


dust in your pocket

by relic_crown



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (probably too much) worldbuilding, Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, F/F, Immortality, Vampire Tom Riddle, but unfortunately Tom thinks suppressing technological advancement is Fun and Sexy, fem!Harry Potter - Freeform, fem!Tom Riddle, shades of steampunk, so much to the author's chagrin: no steampunk.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:55:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26308921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relic_crown/pseuds/relic_crown
Summary: Two hundred years ago, the world died.All that remains is a technicolor wasteland, swirling with ash and populated by radiation-warped humans. Tom, immortal and bloodthirsty, crowns herself queen of this ruined world and wanders it namelessly, building and burning empires at will.Then there's Harry: eyes like chips of sea glass, hopeful in the face of the apocalypse -- and by far the most dangerous person Tom's ever met.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 28
Kudos: 89
Collections: Tomarry Reverse Big Bang 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is for the 2020 Tomarry Reverse Big Bang! Do yourself a favor and check out the other pieces in the collection. Everyone really outdid themselves this year. My piece is based on [these](https://treedaddyd.tumblr.com/post/628461482279141376/heres-some-pieces-i-did-for-the-tomarrybigbang) beautiful artworks by [treedaddyd](https://treedaddyd.tumblr.com/), and in turn inspired this incredible [playlist](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3J6KqsTywbqRw5HZfhGaRCjx_59MP8sA)!
> 
> Strap in, folks. This is a weird one.

Tom was young when the world ended.

These days, she’s probably the last person alive who still remembers the fall of the old world — the blitz and heat and _beauty_ of it all, even as all sanity fled in the light of the new purple sky. The newer generations don’t understand that the world ever ended at all. They cling to ashes, squint up at a red sun, sing songs stripped of history. This desolate landscape is all they’ve ever known.

But Tom carries the burden of memory.

She remembers the old world in flashes: day trips to the ocean, the taste of milk chocolate, laughter that flowed more freely than huckleberry wine. The glow of a screen in her pocket. Fireworks. Machines speeding across green landscapes, running on gasoline and optimism.

And darker things. The cruelty of her caretakers, the misery of a south-bound train. Bullets and nukes and burning cities —

But those only came at the end, when everything had crumbled so rapidly she could hardly track the falling pieces.

Humans had been so fragile, once.

Some still are.

* * *

Tom and Atticus walked together over sand dunes white as salt.

“It’s shrunk,” Tom mused, wrinkling her nose at the stench of rotting kelp and long-dead fish. “The ocean, I mean. The coastline moved.”

“Coastline… moved?” Atticus asked brightly. He roamed along the beach in front of her, finding another shell to tuck into the satchel on his back.

“I don’t keep you around for your brains,” Tom said disdainfully.

He just beamed, long face splitting into an expression of guileless joy.

Anyone else would have returned that smile. Tom didn’t. “The sand we’re walking on right now used to be under water. We’re standing on the seafloor; that’s why there are so many shells here.”

“Oh. Where did the water _go_ , then?”

“I was just trying to determine that, actually. I believe the recent seismic activity may have shifted the earth’s topography, and now this area isn't low enough for water to pool. The logistics of that are impossible, though, at least as far as I can tell...”

“You think the earthquakes made the ocean go away,” Atticus interpreted, happily pressing a nautilus shell into her hands. It was surprisingly beautiful, iridescent even in the muted light of the ash-red sun.

Perhaps she underestimated Atticus. It was unusual for a hybridized equine to display the flashes of intelligence she sometimes glimpsed in him.

“Difficult to say,” Tom said, crouching down to filter a handful of sand through her fingers. “This area has been dry for a long time.”

Atticus hummed in delight, scooping up sand in imitation of her. “You sound like one of the science-tists.”

“That family in Portland?”

“Yeah!” Atticus chittered, digging his front feet into the dunes, looking about ready to start bounding in circles around her. “I miss the city, m’Lord. I liked the science-tists.”

“They’re dead,” she reminded him, continuing forward into the wasted acres of salt. “You helped kill them, Atty, remember? They had that new corrosive we wanted for our own?”

“I liked them,” Atticus said again, smile unwavering.

Back home they called him Atticus the Heartless, the Dark Lord’s Bloody Rider. For all his fearsome reputation, he was just a child. Thirteen, with the flesh of a man and the innocence of a toddler.

“Where did the ocean go, then? Will there still be whales?”

The whales had died out centuries ago, same as the songbirds and polar bears and deciduous trees. 

“We’ll walk until nightfall. If we haven’t found water by then, we’ll turn back home.”

Atticus considered the sky for a moment, the sun not yet at its apex. “Deal.”

They walked for hours over the rolling landscape, shaped by the ebb and flow of forgotten tides. It was like a new kind of desert, this place. Ruled not by heat, but by the scent of death.

As they wandered deeper into the salted tundra, Tom realized there were people here. Atticus didn’t notice the signs: The ashy remains of a campfire in the shelter of a rock outcropping, barely-there footprints plotting a southbound course, a vulture watching from on high. 

Tom did, though.

So when, just past noon, a girl emerged from the shadows of a basalt mound, Tom was not surprised. Atticus was, but he was also _Atticus_ , so his surprise mostly translated to delight. “Hello!” he said. This time he really did bound, kicking salt and sand up with his back legs. “I’m Atticus, and this is the Dark Lord. You should surrender!” 

The girl flinched back into the darkness, eyes wide and luminous.

“Do you want to be friends?” Atticus asked, still charging toward her shelter. “I think we should be friends.”

Tom wandered after him, amused.

The girl still looked wary, but at least she wasn’t running. Atticus arrived next to her and – apparently remembering Tom’s lectures on _personal space_ – began prancing in place. 

Hunched protectively over herself, the girl slowly pulled herself out into the light. Her eyes were massive and silvery, devoid of pupil, and Tom wondered if she was blind. From her head sprouted a pair of feathery antennae. _Fascinating_ , Tom thought. Classifications began bouncing through her mind; she’d never seen this particular mutation. Perhaps an adaptation to life among the dunes?

Maybe Atticus was right. Being around the scientists had brought all sorts of old ways of thinking back to her mind, uncovering lessons she thought she’d forgotten a lifetime ago.

“What’s your name?” Atticus was saying. The girl didn’t respond, but he seemed unbothered by her silence.

“Are we near the waterline?” Tom asked, impatient.

The girl’s eyes widened still further as she took Tom in – Tom, who looked human from afar, but held herself like a predator. Whose skin was as pale as salt and teeth as iridescent as the nautilus shell in her pocket. Who looked just vulnerable enough that the itch of _wrongness_ to her was all the more unnerving. Tom relied on this contradictory appearance.

The moth-antennae girl gestured toward the horizon.

“We know it’s in that direction,” said Tom, peeling her lips back. “How close are we?”

The girl opened her mouth, revealing a shriveled pink slug of a tongue.

Tom hissed in annoyance.

“Nod if we’re close,” Atticus told her kindly.

She nodded.

Atticus cheered.

“Excellent,” Tom said, flexing her hands as she contemplated the ethics of just _killing_ the girl and being done with it. Though she had fed only yesterday, she was growing thirsty, dehydrated by the salt plains.

“Thank you!” Atticus said, his second pair of ears twitching with delight. “Bye, now! We’re going to go see the whales, right, m’Lord?”

Tom smiled indulgently, taming the bloodlust. “Of course, Atticus.”

They walked for another hour. Beneath their feet, the dunes changed, flattening and growing dark with moisture. The scent on the air shifted subtly, becoming more vibrant – if no less pungent.

“Lunch break?” Atticus asked, stomping happily at the water pooling around his hooves.

“When we find another patch of rock,” Tom told him, and he raced away, presumably to search for a stretch of stone for their picnic. 

Shortly, he shouted for her attention, waving her over to a cluster of boulders prickling with dead barnacles and slick with seaweed. Normally, Tom might disdain sitting in such an unrefined location. She’d brought Atticus along on this mission for a reason, though. He placed no stock in appearances; she could wear all her dirtiest clothing and spend days wandering the salt flats, and not a word of it would reach her more stuffy subordinates.

“Suitable,” Tom sniffed, to his elation. “Take a half ration of bread and a full one of water.”

He brayed in excitement. “Would you like some?”

So young.

Tom doesn’t quite remember how old she was when everything crumbled — the meteor strike, the famine, the wars. At least sixteen, but no older than twenty-two.

“Not today,” Tom said. Although she could stomach — and occasionally enjoy — mortal food, she couldn’t justify using up rations in the middle of unclaimed territory, where their next meal was uncertain.

“What about –” He gestured meaningfully toward the meat of his shoulder, angling his head to expose the thick, pulsing vein at his jugular.

Ah. There was the other reason she had brought Atticus along. His horse-strong heart, the singularly nutty taste to his blood. He was by far her favorite bodyguard to feed from.

Her mouth watered at the thought. _Not sustainable_ , part of her warned. Though she had been feeding from Atticus for only three years, the signs of it already marked him. Shadows under the eyes, a green tinge to his veins, reddening at the lymph nodes where he had been itching.

Tom’s venom was a potent thing: euphoric, highly addictive, but taxing on her victim’s bodies. That said, most subjects could last two decades of exposure, long enough that the effects were negligible. Besides, life was uncertain in the wastes of North America – a life-long venom addiction was fair trade for the protection of a Dark Lord.

Atticus, though, likely wouldn’t last five more years. Hybrids like him were so _dreadfully_ unstable. When lonely farmers dying of radiation sickness fucked their horses, those horses weren’t supposed to get pregnant. The fetus certainly wasn’t supposed to survive.

Poor, dear Atticus — like all the hybrids — was an aberration. A crime against nature. Thousands of biological mechanisms were arrayed against his conception. Even compared to Tom’s own bizarre physiology, his existence was an impossibility. His ability to _function_ was practically a feat of magic, even if he was afforded a much shorter lifespan than a full human.

Sometimes it was enough to make Tom believe the cults down south, preaching their doctrine of ‘intelligent ruination’. She could think of no other way to explain some of the mutations. More often than not, the genetic flukes proved helpful; moreover, they manifested traits — feathered antennae, heat-sensing eyes, spines — that Tom couldn’t imagine finding tucked away anywhere in the human genome.

It was a scientific absurdity.

So, intelligent ruination. _Aliens_.

At the very least, it would explain Tom herself.

“I won’t be feeding from you today,” Tom said. “Perhaps we’ll find some other wanderer out here. It’s been too long since I’ve fully drained someone.”

Atticus hummed an acknowledgement through a mouthful of his bread.

When he finished, they continued west. Now, brine pooled in Tom’s footsteps; she took a moment to be grateful for her pair of resilient old boots, overlarge as they were. There were living animals here: Sea stars, tiny skittering crabs, and even a fish scudding its way down a narrow tidal river.

“We should look for higher land,” Tom said. “I believe we’re getting close. This area might be intertidal.”

“Inner… tide?”

“The water might cover it up some of the time.”

“Oh.”

“This hasn’t been the coast for long, so the water has yet to carve out a shoreline. The tide likely sweeps for miles back and forth, given how flat the land is.” She turned to Atticus, but he was already gone, racing away. “What is it? Have you spotted the ocean?”

“ _Whale_!” he called over his shoulder, tail lashing in his wake.

Puzzled, Tom tracked his trajectory. Ah, there was the high ground they were looking for. A spur of rock standing twenty feet above the sandy sludge, and atop it —

Enormous bones. A skull, with its eye holes like windows to darkness and ribs jutting up into the gray sky. Cloth hung from them, the colors weathered away to nothing. And, strangest of all, what looked almost like the sway of wheat planted atop the cliff.

Agriculture, out in this forsaken imitation of a desert? Tom abandoned all pretense of disinterest and raced after Atticus, catching him at the bottom of the rocky cliffside when a shout came from above. They’d been spotted by the inhabitants of this unlikely outpost.

“Look,” said Atticus. “Stairs!”

“Your greatest nemesis,” Tom said, amused. “Do you think you’ll be all right scaling them?”

“I brought my grippy shoes.” Atticus started fumbling in his bag for the footwear they'd salvaged to wear on his hooves.

M.ore shouting. Atticus’s ears twitched, turning to locate the sound.

“Good,” Tom said as he pulled out the shoes with a grunt of triumph. “For the sake of safety, however, I’ll be going first. Can’t have you falling atop me.”

“Okay.”

The stairs were hewn roughly into the side of the rock, uneven and slippery with moss. The barnacles here still lived; she had been right about the tide coming out this far. Tom shuddered to imagine it – water rushing in from the west, ripping across the sand and tearing she and Atticus to pieces. She would feel much better from high ground.

One hand against the slick rock, Tom gingerly ascended. People never constructed railings these days, to her mild chagrin. Funnily enough, concerns over radiation levels and murderous Dark Lords took priority over fall risks.

Not that any of those things could hurt her, anyway.

It was a short climb, if treacherous, and before long Tom had scaled the cliff. She found herself face to face with some half dozen people clutching rudimentary weapons. When they saw her, though, they relaxed.

Tom assessed them in silence. She’d spent over a century honing her sense for danger, and she trusted her instincts. These people were just human, and probably a family judging by their shared red hair. Not a threat.

“Ma’am, we’re going to have to ask you and your little friend to turn around,” a woman with a whale tooth spear said firmly. “This place isn’t open to tourists.”

“She’s just a girl, Cedrella,” said the man beside her. “And look at her – she’s one of us. Surely we can spare –”

“You saw what she’s traveling with,” the woman snapped. “I don’t care how young she looks. We’re not harboring a beast in this place. It’s not worth the risk.”

Tom made a series of covert hand gestures behind her back, warning Atticus to stay hidden. “I understand,” she said levelly. “I’ll go. Before I do, though… Do you have tidal projections? How long do I have to get to safety?”

They exchanged a meaningful glance that told Tom the tides were indeed a source of considerable danger – and that the next words out of their mouths would be lies.

“You have around three hours,” Cedrella said. “Goodbye, now.”

Another rapid series of hand signs. “Goodbye,” Tom responded wryly, and let the bloodlust from before roar back.

The weapons turned out to be a flimsy cover for the family’s vulnerability. Their reactions were sloppy, the scent of their fear more potent even than the stink of the ocean. By the time Atticus scrambled up the cliff, hooves shaking, Tom was already crouched atop the kind man’s chest with her teeth buried in his neck.

She had never been a warrior, not like most of the people in her employ. The battlefield could prove overwhelming for blood parasites such as herself. Her deepest instincts found it difficult to differentiate biting to kill and biting to feed. Still, Tom was nothing if not controlled, and Atticus’ joyous battle scream was enough to snap her away from the corpse and back into the fray.

Mere minutes later, the tide washed in. Though less violent than Tom had feared, it still frothed the salt flats into a dangerous slurry, boneshaking in its power.

By that point, they had dispatched the entire family. Tom curled up in the shelter of the whale’s skull, sluggish and heavy from glutting herself on their lifeblood. She watched contentedly as Atticus, bloody-handed, skipped stones over the surf.

“This was a great vacation,” Atticus said. “I’m glad you took me along.”

Even she couldn’t hold back a fond smile at that. “So am I, Atty.”

* * *

It’s been decades now since that last visit to the seaside. Tom hasn’t returned to the ocean since Atticus died.

She’s not sure why she’s thinking of that old journey. Perhaps it’s the memory of the autonomy; now is the first time in almost four years that she hasn’t had a dozen servants attending to her every need. Perhaps it’s the battered leather traveling coat hung over her shoulders. It had languished in the back of her trunk for years, and still smells faintly of horse sweat.

Perhaps it’s the way people look at her here in the city: derisive, leering. They mistake her for a mere human. It’s… amusing. She hasn’t gone incognito for quite a while.

Part of her misses the ostentation of the Stadium Court, with their rich crimson dyes and the adulation they offered their Lord. Still, it’s refreshing to just wander without the entire world stopping to gawk. She feels like herself again. A beast of feathers and steel, running on stolen blood. Purposeful.

The people on the streets of this ruined city form a motley crowd. Spindly fingers and eyes like shards of oyster shell; half-coyotes and fungal symbiotes. The current fashion appears to be to dangle tin cans from one’s clothing: a woman strides past Tom with a dozen of the things hanging from her cape, knocking together in a head-turning cacophony.

There’s envy in the eyes of the others. Are the cans some new form of currency? Fascinating. Tom will have to investigate further while she’s in the city. There is little chance that it’s more than a fad, of course. Tom herself has tried countless times to replace the barter system and met little success. If _she_ can’t pull off a new economic system, no one can.

She scans the crumbling stone buildings leaning over the street. The city is impossibly crowded. Where are they getting food enough for all these people? Most of the buildings are unmarked – either tenements or headquarters for some group of fools fancying themselves secret organizations. But some have rudimentary signs stamped with pictures – a coat, a spider, an… egg? Maybe her next stint as Dark Lord will feature a literacy campaign. These images mean nothing to her. Another scan of the street – and _there_ is what she’s looking for. A sign clearly depicting a bottle of alcohol.

“Found it,” she tells the single human servant she’d elected to bring.

The girl’s head jerks up sharply. What was her name, again? Daffodil? Poppy? No, _Pansy_. That was it. For the life of her, Tom can’t figure out why people still name their children after kinds of flowers that had died out centuries ago.

“Come along now, Peony,” Tom says imperiously.

Pansy rolls her eyes. Impertinent child. Disrespectful or not, she willingly follows Tom into the bar, ducking her head into her black robes. A man at the entrance moves to stop her but a flash of Tom’s curving incisors is enough to keep him back.

For all the changes Tom has seen in her sprawling lifespan, taverns have stayed remarkably consistent. Always dimly lit, always rank with the same scent of unwashed bodies and stale booze. Only the patrons change, mutations warping them into forms more alien by the generation.

Tom scans the tables, searching out a likely group. Her gaze passes over a cluster of muscle-bound people, glowing faintly green and murmuring to one another in a soft northern dialect. Past another group of assorted hybrids, all clustered around a woman with alarmingly purple eyes. 

_There_. In the darkest corner of the tavern sits a group of six. Four look mundane, while the other two hold themselves with a brutal confidence enforced by their hooked claws.

Tom dodges through the tables to sit herself down at the darkened table in question. The group goes abruptly silent, their covert conversation sputtering and dying in the wake of her… rudeness? _Rudeness_ , right. Normal people have to obey social mores. She keeps forgetting about those. Pansy, who cursing softly as she shoves her way through the room, comes to stand at attention behind Tom’s chair.

One of the clawed women sighs heavily, leaning forward. “Did you want something, kid?”

Tom makes a half-hearted attempt to look intimidated.

“My sister wasn’t clear enough,” says the other clawed woman. “That was an invitation to _get out of our hair_.”

“I want to join your rebel group,” Tom says with as much youthful vigor as she can summon.

There are a dozen resistance groups in the city, all proclaiming themselves saviors united in opposition to the evil Dark Lord Voldemort. It’s the sort of thing she uses to fuel her villainous cackles: all these little people, each of them dreaming of ruling conquered lands — and they can’t even gather under one banner. As the Dark Lord, she could have crushed them on a whim if they ever posed a real threat.

This little group is almost certainly part of one of those factions. Nowhere has she encountered unmutated people with such hope in their eyes than those among rebel forces, and this particular gathering strikes her as sickeningly spirited.

“You can’t just _join_ the Order of the Phoenix,” one of them says, puffing up his chest pompously.

Looks like she’s right about this group, though they could stand to learn something about subtlety. “Oh?”

“Shut up, Zach,” rumbles one of the clawed women. Then, to Tom, “did someone tell you we were meeting here?”

“No.”

“Well, we normally recruit based on recommendations by our members. So unless you have a friend in our ranks…?”

Tom makes a big show of deflating. “I just love truth and justice _so very much_ ,” she says. For all her best efforts, it comes out sarcastic. Hopefully they don’t notice. “I want the opportunity to fight for what I believe in! Won’t you at least give me a chance?”

As soon as she’s away from these people, she’ll need to find an alleyway to vomit in. This saccharine act is turning her stomach – well, turning her abdominal blood sack. Her internal organs are far from human, according to the dissections she’d conducted on others of her kind decades ago.

The clawed women exchange a meaningful glance.

“Please? My… _friend —_ ” it had been a long time since Tom has said that word. Ew. “– Violet and I are unmutated, you see. There’s no other way for us to change the world.”

The clawed women confer quietly. Tom catches snatches of their conversation: “… _ask Harry…_ _danger… more ranks…_ ” 

One of the humans frowns, staring at Tom through enormous milky-blue eyes. On a second glance, Tom’s not honestly sure she _is_ fully human. Those eyes remind her uncannily of the mute girl with the moth’s antennae. “She’s lying,” the blue-eyed girl says, pinning Tom with a glare that grows more accusatory by the second.

Tom puffs herself up in indignation, then recalls her persona and shifts to the expression of a wounded animal. “Excuse me?”

“You’re _not_ unmutated. You’re lying.”

Tom sputters indignantly, turning to Pansy for backup. Pansy just rolls her eyes, further illustrating her uselessness. 

“I can’t disprove a negative,” Tom protests, scowling.

One of the clawed women clears her throat meaningfully. “Luna, I don’t suppose you have a reason for calling her a liar?”

“Teeth,” Luna says shortly.

Tom sucks her lips over her teeth, cursing internally.

“They’re iridescent. Sure sign of a Xelikspur.”

Oh. Now, that – that is not what Tom expected. “Excuse me?”

“See?” Luna says smugly, and then there are surprisingly gentle hands on her face, peeling her lips away from her teeth.

Tom half-shrieks, half-hisses, pushing her away. “ _Do you want to die, mortal_?”

The noise in the tavern dims for a moment as patrons pause in their conversations to offer a judgmental glance in the direction of their table. Behind her, Tom hears the distinct sound of Pansy facepalming.

“Definitely not human,” says Luna, not looking remotely intimidated.

“Oh, you are _very_ stupid, aren’t you.”

“Woah, there,” the first clawed woman says, holding out her hands in a gesture of peace. “So you’re not fully human. Cool. Why on earth would you _lie_ about that?”

“It’s more dramatic that way.”

They stare at her. She shrugs — it’s true. These days, drama is one of her primary motivators. Eternity might as well be entertaining.

“Then… what _are_ you?” asks the other clawed woman.

“Xelikspur,” Luna mutters. In the low light, with her bulbous eyes and flyaway blond hair, she looks quite mad.

“All shall be revealed in time,” Tom says solemnly, pulling on a different mask. The ‘cult leader persona’, she calls this one. Mysterious, confident, charismatic. “For now, take me to your leader.”

The clawed women fix her with identical looks of skepticism.

“Okay,” Luna says brightly. “Let’s go.” She throws down the rest of her tankard in a single swallow, then climbs to her feet.

Tom watches in astonishment as the others, with a minimum of grumbling, ready themselves to depart. She had completely misread the group dynamic. Is Luna, ostensibly a human, their first-in-command?

Pushing aside her disquiet, Tom follows them out. Their entourage ducks through the crowd. Behind Tom, Pansy stays close, eying the others warily.

At the head of their procession, Luna slips into an alleyway. They leave the main road behind in favor of a circuitous, dark pathway. Here, only a thin slice of the ash-gray sky peeks through the buildings looming high overhead. Though most windows are boarded up, Tom feels watched. Under the shoddy new construction is the blackened ruin of what was once a city. Chicago, Tom thinks, but no one quite remembers anymore.

They come to a halt in the festering depths of the city, where the air smells of piss and rust and the tenements are but shells. Ruins upon ruins. Luna drifts down a shadowed flight of stone stairs leading into the ground – the remains of an entrance to a basement, perhaps? She stands on her tiptoes and raps on what looks like a wooden door at the bottom.

The door opens. On the other side stands a man who manages to come across as handsome despite his overly large ears and rheumy eyes. He laughs softly at something Luna says, then turns to wave for the others to follow.

The clawed women stand on either side of Tom. One tries to put a hand on Tom’s shoulder but subsides at her warning growl. They shuffle down the stairs, then through the door and into a narrow, damp corridor of concrete and sickly-pale lichen.

Tom’s not sure what she had expected when they came out on the other side of the tunnel. Certainly not a cavernous sub-basement crackling with lantern light, floors covered in thin carpet, bustling with casually weapon-wielding people. She exchanges a glance with Pansy – this branch of the Rebellion is far better funded and armed than the Stadium Court’s intelligence had suggested was possible. It’s… unnerving, to say the least.

“Padma!” A woman with four arms, two of them full of books, greets one of the clawed women. “You’re back so soon. Did Luna find what she was looking for?”

“We found two kids looking to join up,” the clawed woman on Tom’s left — Padma — says drily. “Luna, is that what you were looking for?”

“No,” says Luna. “It’s _better_. Hermione, one of them has iridescent teeth. She’s a Xelikspur, I’m sure of it! She’ll be able to guide us to the Caves of Alicante, and teach us the secrets of dragonfly taming —!”

If they were in Tom’s seat of power, she would order this delusional child killed. “Have you ever even seen a dragonfly?” she asks Luna.

Her bulbous blue eyes widen. “They’re extinct, silly.”

Tom indulges in a fantasy of sinking her fangs into Luna’s pale throat.

“Iridescent fangs?” Hermione, the four-armed woman, stepped closer to Tom and stood on her tiptoes to get her eyes level with Tom’s teeth.

It takes all of Tom’s willpower not to bare them.

“She wouldn’t tell us what she is,” says Padma. “Said she wants to see the boss.”

Hermione hums speculatively. “Parvati, could you hold our guest’s hands behind her back for me?”

Tom stiffens, confused. This is a test, obviously, and she’ll be better served by playing along. Warily, she allows the second clawed woman to take her hands, assuaged only by the certainty that she can break her hold if needed.

“You’re _cold_ ,” Parvati says with surprise.

Hermione’s eyes flicker with – satisfaction? Tom doesn’t have the chance to parse the strange reaction before one of Hermione’s hands is rising to hover in front of her face. 

Tom squints dubiously down at the bushy-haired rebel. “What are you trying to accomplish?” she asks, careful not to show her teeth.

Hermione twists her hand so her wrist is directly in front of Tom’s nose. Tom can’t help but shiver at the proximity. She can feel the heat of the other woman’s body, hear the thud of her living heart, smell the coppery tang of her blood —

“Dilated pupils,” Hermione says triumphantly, taking her hand away. “Likely some kind of blood parasite. I’m not familiar with a mutation that leads to both blood parasitism and pearlescent teeth — well, other than the obvious.”

Tom curls her lip, giving up on the human act completely.

Padma eyes her warily. “Yeah, that’s honestly pretty creepy. Uh, ‘Mione, what exactly is ‘the obvious’?”

“Type three deviation,” Hermione recites. “Spontaneous first-world mutation yielding a pseudo-immortal blood parasite.”

The handsome man chokes. “You think she's a _vampire_?”

“No,” Hermione says. “I’m just saying that’s the only classification of blood parasite I know of that has teeth like that.”

Pansy is frowning at Tom — and she’s not wrong to. This is not going according to plan.

Tom wrestles herself out of Parvati's grasp and makes a show out of dusting off her old leather traveling coat. “If you’re quite finished, I’d like to meet with your leader. I believe that was the deal.”

Hermione cocks her head. “You can’t be a vampire. They died out an age ago. Unless — a new strain…? But they couldn’t reproduce…”

“Hermione’s as close as you’re going to get to our leader,” Padma says, resting a protective hand on Hermione’s shoulder. “We can’t just trust a strange parasite, even if Luna does think you’re interesting.”

“No,” Hermione says, handing her books over to one of the other rebels and stepping back into Tom’s space. “Harry’ll want to meet her. If she is a type three — can you imagine? No wonder she’s been so dodgy. We’re taking her in.”

Tom glares down at her, radiating disdain.

Hermione stretches out her hand, smiling. “Nice to meet you, _recruit_. This is how people introduced themselves in the first world, right? With a handshake?”

Tom takes her hand and kneels to kiss it, letting her fangs rasp against the brown skin of Hermione’s knuckles. “Lead the way,” she says, savoring the sudden fear in her eyes. “The name’s Tom, by the way.”

“Right.” Hermione snatches her hand back and holds it against her chest, jaw set in stubborn courage. “Tom. Let’s go.”

Hermione leads Tom through a warren of tunnels hewn from hard-packed dirt and concrete. From the walls hang lanterns and tapestries. Copper pipes jut out in places, roughly hacked out of the path. Tom idly wonders what the rebels think of the pipes. Do they even comprehend the concept of plumbing?

She maps the corridors in her mind, trying to track their location under the city. The tunnel network is impressively extensive, especially given that the rebels don’t have access to explosives.

They arrive, finally, in a cavernous room. Some sort of officer’s quarters, Tom guesses by the hammocks hanging in an alcove to the left. The floor is clean stone, painted with a map of the Great Lakes region. Apart from the tentacled monsters in the lakes and the toothy beasts wandering the forests, it’s a remarkably accurate rendering.

Dwarfed by the room are a cluster of three people tucked away at a table in the corner. They look up at their entrance, no hint of wariness in their expressions — why would there be? Here, in their precious stronghold, very little could threaten them.

Tom smiles, knowing they won’t be able to discern the bloody joy underlying the expression.

“Harry, we’ve got two potential new recruits here,” Hermione says. “This one’s been… difficult. But I think she could be quite the boon.”

Parvati nudges Tom forward, toward the tiny council, and she gets a better look at the leaders of this rebel faction.

Two red-heads, their shared freckles and crafty eyes marking them as siblings. The taller of the two is grease-smeared and slouching. Though he looks young, laugh lines already etch his face. His sister is lean and muscular, coiled tight with a warrior’s perpetual battle-readiness. Just humans, Tom thinks, but undeniably dangerous nevertheless.

Between them sits a woman with close-cropped, densely curling black hair and skin almost as dark. She’s short, especially next to her two gangly lieutenants, but there’s an undeniable gravity to her; when she stands to greet their group, the rest of the world seems to stand at attention.

“I see,” the woman says, peering at Tom through eyes like shards of sea glass. “I’m Harry. Welcome to the Order of the Phoenix. Now, let’s hear your story…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to the fantastic [vanillaghost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillaghost) for beta'ing this chapter!


	2. Chapter 2

The concept itself is simple. Infiltrate a rebel faction, then lead them to victory against a puppet installed as a figurehead for one of her own abandoned regimes.

It’s a plan that requires a frankly ludicrous amount of setup, of course, but Tom has never found such a _fun_ means of conquering. She’s pulled a similar routine twice in the past, to absolutely delightful results.

Now, she’s replaced the Dark Lord Voldemort by dear Bellatrix in a mask, thus leaving _herself_ free to fraternize with rebels. It will take perhaps two months to rise through the ranks of the Order – unless she can find a shortcut.

She plans to find a shortcut.

* * *

Tom was barely half a century old when she departed Britain, traveling across the Atlantic in what had once been a cargo ship. She hadn’t meant to _stay_ in America.

But she was so young then. She hadn’t yet learned how to say _no_ to the pleading eyes of a beautiful woman.

Daphne Greengrass was unmutated – but this was another age, when there was still oil in the ground and the apocalypse felt fresh and new. When there was still a hope of returning to normalcy – still a _memory_ of normalcy. The vast majority of people were unmutated.

She’d met Daphne in a bar. Not a tavern, like the ones so common in the ashes of Chicago; a high-class thing. Back then, there was still an upper class to frequent such locations, still an upper class built on wealth instead of savagery. An upper class that pretended there was a _difference_ between the two, at least.

Daphne possessed a kind of sweet charm that dulled the taste of their mutual manipulations. She liked to dance. Tom doesn’t remember that much else about her, if she’s honest with herself; just blond hair and the heavy scent of a floral perfume.

One thing led to another and Tom had bitten her, because Tom is a parasitic life form and _that’s what she does_. Bite people.

Blood parasitism was so much less common, back in those days, but Daphne took the venom addiction surprisingly well. For a time, Tom had been – well, a sugar baby, she supposes. Fifty-four years old, leeching off the fortune of a mortal woman’s family.

And then the Greengrasses had grown uncomfortable at the brewing oil wars in England and decided to make for the States, where natural gases were still rumored to flow. Tom had allowed herself to be towed along, standing on a mighty ship with Daphne by her side, stealing kisses in the dark of the night, dancing to the rumble of Tom’s singing voice. She’d tasted the scent of the sea and dreamed herself hewn of metal, gliding through the briny air toward her destiny.

“I’m so glad you came with us,” Daphne told her one night, as they watched the rising moon tip the ocean waves in shimmering silver.

Tom pressed the flat of a fang against her hot throat and exhaled, smiling at Daphne’s shiver. “What was I supposed to do, leave you to rot without my venom?”

Daphne giggled raspily, exposing her neck, and Tom had fed, slow and shallow, the smell of lavender and sea breeze melding into a sweet, heady whole. It had been beautiful, even if the color of Daphne’s eyes has faded from the memory.

In the end, the Greengrasses hadn’t cared for America. The States had oil – or would for the next decade, at least – but also guns, and warlords, and swathes of land stretching dizzily to the horizon.

Tom was in love.

With the land, not the girl. She left Daphne after barely two months in the New World. It was a cruelty; the sudden venom withdrawal had almost certainly killed her.

Another death for the list. At the time, Tom thinks it bothered her. Not enough to regret her choices, but still a nettling irritant that followed her for months.

She wouldn’t regret it now. She’s killed more than she could dream of counting. Personal affection stopped being a factor long ago.

* * *

Now, over a century later, Hermione pushes Tom toward Harry. Tom brings herself to her full height and fixes the rebel leader with an imperious stare. Tom’s easily a foot taller.

Harry swaps a grin with the red-headed woman at her side, like the height disparity is some great joke to them, and Tom grits her teeth.

“Well?” Harry says. “Tell me about yourself.”

Before Tom can so much as open her mouth to start spouting lies, Hermione says, “according to Padma, she came in claiming to be unmutated.”

“She’s not,” Luna adds helpfully. “She’s got fangs, and probably other mutations besides.” No more reference to ‘Xelikspurs,’ thankfully.

“Definitely a blood parasite of some variety,” says Hermione. “Harry, I… I think there’s a chance she’s a type three. Spontaneous mutation.”

Harry’s startlingly green eyes blink. “You think this kid is a vampire.”

Tom sneers.

“Show her your teeth,” says Luna.

Tom takes a moment to breathe in deeply, reminding herself that this is part of the _plan_ , that dignity is unachievable during this early part of the operation. She forces herself to bare her teeth, letting them refract the lamplight into a dizzying rainbow shine.

Harry rocks back on her heels. “Well, then. That’s – huh. Hermione, you really think –”

“I don’t know what to think,” Hermione says crisply. “Tom, why don’t you explain yourself? We were all under the impression that vampires died off years before we were born.”

“Killed by the Dread Lord Marvolo,” Tom agrees solemnly. That had been one of her favorite titles. _Dread Lord_. Shame it’s attached so firmly to the Marvolo persona… it will be another century before she can use it again without that particular stain. “Marvolo was one of our own, but she wanted sole claim to the powers we hold. Of course, she couldn’t destroy all vampires – I escaped her forces and went into hiding.”

The red-headed man at Harry’s side frowns. “So you’re two hundred years old? You were alive when –”

“Yes,” Tom says, reveling in his sudden pallor. “I saw the first world.”

Hermione grins victoriously. By her side, Harry folds her arms over her chest; Tom notices they’re covered in long gloves, from her fingertips almost to her biceps. “I suppose it would be foolish to refuse you, in light of that.”

The lanky man nods sharply. “It would. Welcome to the Order of the Pheonix, Tom. We’ll appreciate your expertise.”

Tom blinks. That was fast. “And my attendant?”

“By all means,” Harry says, shrugging. “Padma will help you find quarters. Tomorrow, I expect you to split your time between Hermione and Ginny. ‘Mione will be wanting to continue her interrogations, I assume, and Ginny –” the red-headed woman nods, smirking “– will get you ready to go on missions.”

Tom winces. “I was hoping to serve a more… strategic role.”

“I thought you wanted to fight for truth and justice,” Luna says from behind her, eyes huge and betrayed.

“I lied,” Tom says balefully.

“What _do_ you want with us, then?” Ginny asks, tapping her foot. “I mean, what, you came out of hiding to join a rebel group? Why now?”

“I’ve lived a long time.” Tom stands up straighter, letting more of the length of her fangs show between her lips. Her face may be preserved in youth, but she knows how to draw attention to the true age behind it. “I can recognize a plague on the land when I see it. The Dark Lord Voldemort is nothing if not a _plague_.”

“Quite right,” Hermione says. “Now, I have a lot of work to do. Harry, if you’ll excuse me…?”

“Hang back a moment, Hermione,” Harry says. “Ron’s got some sort of breakthrough, and I’d like your opinion.” She looks up, frowning. “The rest of you can go.”

“C’mon, then.” Padma sets back off into the tunnels, waving for Tom and Pansy to follow.

“For the record,” Pansy mutters as they fall in line. “I hate _everything_ about this situation. Rust and ruin, m’Lord, I used to think you were _cool_. But this is terrible.”

“Thanks for your input, Rosie,” says Tom. “If I want any more thrilling analysis from my pet blood bag, I’ll ask.”

“I thought I was your favorite attendant.”

Tom scoffs. “Hardly.”

“You like the way I braid your hair.”

“But not your _incessant chatter_.”

Padma turns. “Everything all right back there?”

“Peachy,” Tom says, baring her teeth.

“No idea what that means.”

Pansy sighs hugely. “We’re fine.”

“Right, well, we’re here,” Padma says. “You can take these two hammocks here. Get some rest now.”

“I doubt the sun’s even set,” Tom says.

“Down here, we don’t worry about time in the same way as people on the surface.” Padma inspects her claws with idle glee. “Believe me. You’ll want to be rested when Ginny comes for you. She’s a vicious taskmaster.”

“Understood.” Tom turns away, dropping her bag into the dust under one of the hammocks.

Padma frowns at her, hesitating, then glances at Pansy and takes her leave.

Tom sits on her hammock, surveilling their new accommodations. “Looks like we’ll have roommates,” she observes, abandoning all pretense of respectability. “They left their bags… do you think there’s anything of value in there?”

Pansy stares. “My Lord, with _all due respect_ , we’re supposed to be undercover. You can’t just pickpocket these people.”

“I suppose you’re right.” Tom kicks her feet up, sending herself wildly swinging. “It’s been a while since I’ve been a soldier. Don’t worry; I’ll adjust soon enough.”

Pinching the bridge of her nose, eyes obscured in the low lighting, Pansy says, “how much of it was an act?”

“Hmm?”

“The brave leader, the cunning tactician… all the roles you played to convince us you were worth following. My cousin died in your service – I’ve sold the rest of my life to you and your venom! And this – it’s just a game to you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” No use obfuscating the truth, not at this point. Pansy has a chemical dependency on Tom’s venom, and she’s cut off from everyone who loves her. “I’m always playing a part, in my own way. What does it matter to you? I get results.”

Pansy slumps, letting her meager traveling pack fall to the ground.

Tom snaps her fingers. Heeding her unspoken command, the defeated girl pulls herself into her lap, neck bared. Gently, Tom places her lips over the vein, tonguing for a pulse, and sinks her teeth through the thin skin.

The blood is hot enough to send a shock through her system, and she shivers, pulling Pansy’s limp form closer. She whimpers, curling towards her, but Tom is already disengaging. “You heard our new friends,” she murmurs, shoving aside the desire to finish her meal. “You’ll need your strength for the trials to come. I don’t want to take too much of your blood.”

Pansy blinks blearily up at Tom, her normally bright wit vanished in the haze of venom flowing through her. “Like you care,” she grumbles.

Tom smooths hair away from Pansy’s face, feeling oddly meditative. “I _don’t_ ,” she says, but already the girl’s eyelids grow lazy, drawn low by the venom’s sleepy contentment.

Tom lays down properly on the hammock, arranging Pansy atop her. For this moment, stolen blood spreading through her long-dead veins, the warmth of a living form draped across her cold flesh, she feels almost human.

* * *

Harry herself is there for Tom’s first ‘training session’ with Ginny. She stands in the corner, fiddling with that same pair of long gloves and wearing an expression of studied boredom.

Tom freezes, eyes narrowing. “Commander? What brings you here?”

“I want to see how a real live vampire fights,” says Harry, green eyes widening with exaggerated – _mocking_ – interest. “Pretend I’m not even here.”

Ginny snickers.

Tom considers her plans, wondering how long it will be before she can get away with killing the both of them. “Surely you have more important matters to attend to.”

Harry grins, revealing a mouth of very normal teeth. For the first time, Tom wonders what she _is_. Her initial impulse is to pin her as human – but so many mutations are invisible. And something about those gloves…

Ginny claps loudly, startling Tom. “We’ll start with a basic test of skill to set a baseline.”

“Right.”

“Ready?”

“I – yes.”

Ginny’s smile slices through her freckled face. “Good. Fight me.”

Rather than allowing herself the indulgence of an eyeroll, Tom – Tom _lunges_.

She’s rewarded with a grunt of surprise from Ginny as they collide. _Weren’t expecting that, now, were we_ , she thinks viciously. Damn cocky, that – it’s the face, Tom’s sure. People never fail to underestimate her based on her apparent youth.

Cocky or not, Ginny takes Tom’s competence in stride. She knocks her away with apparent ease; merely human though she may be, she’s strong.

They’re both unarmed – not that Tom minds. She hasn’t used a weapon since guns fell out of fashion. She snaps her teeth, feels her incisors elongate with the thrill of the fight. Lowers herself to the ground and licks her lips.

Another advantage to not feeding fully from Pansy the previous night: she’s still hungry. And hunger makes her _sharp_.

Ginny watches her carefully. Tom can hear her heartbeat, can smell the sweet rush of blood pulsing just below her skin. Tom’s instincts scream at her to pounce, and it’s so easy to obey them, wielding her canines like sabers, feeling her jaw unhinge to allow her better access.

Like so many before her, Ginny is so distracted by Tom’s fangs that she misses the threat of her hands, and Tom lands a solid punch to her stomach. At the same time, Ginny manages to kick her legs out from her.

Tom falls in a clumsy whirl of limbs. It’s difficult to knock the breath out of someone who doesn’t need to breathe, though; she’s quick to bounce up and back into her attack of a now-wheezing Ginny.

Ginny stumbles back into a defensive stance. “Not bad at all,” she says roughly, still coughing.

“Hand-to-hand is a ridiculous combat style.” Tom sneers. “For realism, you should at least have a sword.”

“Are you –” Ginny sucks in a deep breath, “– are you accusing me of going easy on you?”

“Yes,” Tom says. “But look, I’m trying to even the playing field by chatting with you and giving you a chance to recover from that little tumble.”

From the corner, Tom hears a low, inelegant chuckle. Risking a glance, she finds Harry, eyes bright with such genuine amusement that Tom feels almost that – well, that if she needed to breathe, she would have had the breath knocked out of her all over again.

This time Ginny makes the first move, forcing Tom’s mind back to the combat. Still, part of her is locked on the woman in the corner. There’s a scent on the air – almost floral, but with a bitter note that has her off balance.

Ginny slams against her, skin warm and gloriously _alive_. Tom’s fangs ache, and her lolling jaw lets mixed venom and saliva dribble onto her chest. If she can score another hit – get the scent of blood on the air –

That _smell_ again. Though she’s grappling with Ginny properly now, trapped in a dance of tooth and elbow and the maddening sound of a human heart, Tom can’t quite concentrate on the fight. What is that underlying bitterness? It’s so _familiar_ ; it makes her think of salt and rot, of freedom…

“Ha!” Ginny throws herself bodily down atop Tom, pinning her to the sandy floor of the practice room, her face flushed with life, chest heaving. “Wasn’t going easy on you.”

“Hmm,” Tom says distantly. “Yes, you, ah… you sure showed me.”

She’s smelling the sea. That’s it, she’s sure.

Ginny lets her up, and she carefully reaches up to fit her jaw back into place, wiping vivid purple venom from her lips.

Harry’s watching with fascination, all amusement gone, and Tom knows with sudden certainty that _she_ is the source of the smell. Wisteria flowers and ocean brine. An impossible scent.

Tom finds herself adrift, paralyzed by nostalgia in a way that’s becoming more and more common as she ages. She stares down at her drug-stained fingers, lost in memories. The Scottish seaside, gray under a stormy sky; the North Sea gone violet in the light of the meteor that changed the world; flying across the waves on the deck of one of the last big boats; watching an aberration skip stones across a deadly tide.

Eyes the color of sea glass, set in a face that Tom realizes is quite lovely, actually.

“Aw, Harry.” Ginny follows Tom’s gaze, expression souring. “Were you distracting her? That’s not fair.”

Harry looks away, fiddling with her gloves. “It wasn’t on purpose. Uh, sorry, I guess? I can leave if the blood-sucker can’t get her head on straight.”

“Wait –” Tom says, but Harry’s already slipping away.

Ginny cracks her knuckles. “Right. I’ll go get my sword. I take it you’re ready for another round?”

Tom falters, watching Harry’s slim form disappear down the tunnel. “What _is_ she?”

“Your commanding officer,” Ginny says dismissively, a smile playing about her lips. “C’mon, Tom. You’re the best fighter we’ve had in a while. Let me test myself against you – for real this time.”

Tom pushes away a strand of hair fallen free from her braid and heaves a huge, unneeded breath, trying to push the lingering scent of ocean out of her lungs. She almost wants to smile in return. “By all means.”

* * *

Two weeks of this proves enough to entrench Tom within the inner ring of the Order of the Phoenix. She matches blades with Ginny, wits with Hermione, and… _something_ with Luna. Harry continues to pop in at inopportune moments, filling the air with the scent of the ocean. Her proximity makes Tom’s abdominal blood sac do flips. It’s most unpleasant.

Tom’s first mission is a trivial matter: Ron needs ‘shit to burn’, according to Hermione’s briefing. Tom and her squad – Parvati, Zacharias, and Lavender – are meant to venture out of the rebellion’s subterranean hideout to find suitable materials.

“Pretty routine,” Harry tells her as they stand at a tunnel exit. She’s just dropped off orders, and is watching sharply as Tom peruses the mission parameters. “Very unlikely that you encounter any danger.”

“Boring,” Tom translates, but she honestly doesn’t mind.

“You said you wanted to be a tactician,” says Harry, arching a brow. “I’ve let you sit in on most of our strategic meetings. Now you need some on-the-ground experience commanding troops.”

“Troops,” Tom drawls. “You mean a pair of humans and a babysitter?”

“Don’t be a brat.”

“A _br_ – do you know how _old_ I am?”

“Humans make very capable soldiers,” says Harry drily. “They’re eighty percent of the population, as far as Hermione can tell. Underestimating them just feeds into Dark Lord propaganda.”

 _They_. So Harry really isn't human.

“Besides,” Harry continues, “ _I’ll_ be coming with.”

“Uh… why?”

“Like I said before, I want to see what you’re capable of. You should be pleased.”

 _Huh_. _Interesting_. “I suppose I am.”

“Good. Suite up, soldier.”

Bemused – and almost flattered, despite herself – Tom complies, pulling on a cloth mask and buttoning up her old leather traveling coat. She’s not quite sure what to make of Harry’s scrutiny, but it surely won’t hurt her plans. If she’s honest with herself, it’s almost – well.

No need for honesty.

Her group of four is all assembled, dressed in a motley array of dark clothing and the same crude masks.

“Don’t mind me,” Harry tells the others, eyes smiling above her mask. “Tom’s in charge here. I’m just… observing.”

“It’s been too long since we’ve run patrol together, besides.” Parvati laughs, tapping Harry on the shoulder. “This’ll be fun.”

“Whatever,” says Zacharias, toying with a knife at his belt. “Can we get moving? We’re burning daylight. Not all of us have weird night vision.”

“Shut it, you,” Parvati says teasingly. “It’s _heat-sensing vision_ , thank you very much. You’re just jealous.”

It’s difficult to make out Zach’s expression, but Tom has the distinct impression that he’s sticking his tongue out under his mask.

“If you two are quite _finished_ ,” she snaps. “We should get going.”

It’s bright up above. Even tinged red and choked with ash, the sky stares down upon them with terrible intensity, stirring long-buried memories of sunburn and the scent of protective lotions.

Strange, how easy it has been to adjust to life in the tunnels: the sparse pockets of lanternlight, the comradery of the rebels, the comforting weight of the earth. They’ve come out in what were once the suburbs; in this new age, the landscape is a flat wasteland. A uniform checkerboard of burnt husks stretches to the horizon.

A fire had raged through this place, decades past. In its wake stand blackened foundations and the occasional gaping black maw of an exposed basement. Though years of rain have washed the site clean, Tom can still taste smoke on the air. She’s thankful for the mask.

“Partner off and sweep a perimeter of five hundred feet, looking for combustibles that might have survived the fire,” Tom orders. “Though I’m not overly optimistic. Check basements, but don’t take unnecessary risks. Meet back here after your survey; we’ll assess our chances at this site, then move on to somewhere the fire didn’t reach.”

Harry crushes a hunk of charcoal beneath her boot, then stoops to pick it up. It’s not burnt all the way through.

“Parvati and Zacharias, start in the south and move east. Lavender, with me. Harry –”

Harry brings the scorched wood up to her mask, like she’s trying to sniff it through the fabric.

“You’ll come with the two of us,” Tom says. “We’ll start north and move west.”

“Sounds good.” Harry drops the wood and follows in Tom’s wake.

They cross a stretch of cracked asphalt and dust, kicking away ashes. There’s a stillness to this place, a weight to the air that sets Tom on edge.

“We’ll check in there first.” Tom indicates a house that appears relatively unblackened, though the roof has caved in.

Harry eyes her choice dubiously, but says nothing.

“That doesn’t look very safe,” Lavender offers gently. “Do you think maybe –”

“You two will keep watch while I scout inside,” says Tom, impatient. “Believe me, I’m damn near invulnerable. A falling building would hardly hurt me.”

Harry looks alarmed at this, but again stays silent.

“Concentrate your lookout on the north, opposite the direction from which we came. I’m going in.”

This is always the most frustrating stage of an operation like this: gaining trust. As she ages, she begins to lose patience with the process. Rebels tend to be particularly difficult to bring to heel, irritatingly enough. The tall-attractive-confident vampire routine fails to immediately persuade them, leaving her to perform the same desperate act of _proving competence_ that normal people have to endure.

She steps into the shell of the house through the maw of a shattered window. Inside, she finds the singed remains of life. Hooks on the wall marking where portraits once hung. Patches of plastic melted into the floorboards – children’s toys, now shapeless and white? There’s a low, musty scent on the stale air, and Tom guesses that if she were to search long enough, she’d find bones in the wreckage.

Ears alert for the sound of fracturing wood, she presses herself against the wall. Crashing through the floor into the basement would be more efficient, sure, but she guesses Harry would be furious to find her behaving so rashly.

Besides, as Tom picks her cautious way around the corner, she finds a pre-made hole in the flooring. Peering over the edge into the shadows below, she can see the remnants of a shattered sofa – its weight had likely caused the collapse in the first place.

Throwing caution to the wind, Tom hops down. She aims for the sofa, holding out hope that it will soften her impact – and it does, in its own way.

She lands with a hideous squelch and leaps off the cushions, biting down on her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. Still, its difficult to suppress her nausea. The basement is slick with damp and mold. Up close, she can see the fungus encrusting the ancient sofa and licking its way up the walls. Saturated with damp as it all is, she won’t find anything for Ron to burn down here.

That musty scent to the house is compounded unbearably, weighing on her superhuman senses. It had come not from an old human corpse, but instead the rotting remnants of the basement. Disgusting.

A shout from up above.

Tom stills, listening.

“Tom!” Harry’s voice, stripped of its usual cool composure. “Get back up here. Now.”

 _Fuck_. Tom swallows her revulsion and stands, grimacing, back up on the spongy remains of the couch so she can scrabble her way back into the light.

Up above, she can hear distant noises: rough laughter, the clatter of movement.

She eases herself through a different ground-floor window and finds herself face to face with a crouching Harry and a wide-eyed Lavender.

“Stadium Court patrol,” Lavender whispers. “These are neutral grounds… they must be looking to expand again.”

Bellatrix always had been the ambitious type, Tom thinks fondly. It will be interesting to see how well she can govern a larger domain – not well at all, Tom is sure. She hadn’t exactly chosen Bella for her leadership abilities. Still, it might be an interesting experiment.

“Orders, Tom?” Harry asks.

“You sure you don’t want to take the lead on this one, boss?” Tom says drily. “This is way outside the bounds of my rookie assignment.”

Harry makes a choking noise Tom thinks is meant to be a laugh. “We both know how ridiculous it is to call you a rookie. No, I think you can handle this.”

A breeze passes over them, stirring the ends of Tom’s wispy bangs. Harry is watching her, still as stone. _Goodness_ , but she’s pretty.

The Stadium Court patrol is just four members strong. Tom recognizes two of them. Rookwood, with his hunched shoulders and jagged horns, and – _oh_. Lucius himself, leading the others with his customary aloofness.

If Tom has been looking for a shortcut through the rebel ranks, this is it.

“We’re taking them out,” she says grimly. “I spent some time before I joined up watching the Stadium Court. That man up front, in the red? I think he’s one of their leaders.”

Harry makes an expression Tom can’t decipher through her mask. “Right, then. Ready when you are.”

Lavender recoils. “Wait, really?” she hisses. “ _Harry_.”

“Not you,” says Harry softly. “Tom, I’m letting you do this, but I’m not giving you clearance to order anyone into a situation they don’t want to be in.”

Tom bites down on her tongue to keep in a sigh. “Fine. Lavender, go back and tell the others,” Tom says. “Tell them Harry and I are going to do something dangerous, and we could use some backup.”

Lavender wavers, looking to Harry for guidance.

“It’s a calculated risk, Lavender,” Harry says levelly. “Tom’s farther from human than the rest of us. She won’t lose a fight. As for me… well, I’m not exactly _untouchable_ , but you know how dangerous I can be.”

Though she doesn’t look pleased, Lavender departs.

Harry solemnly strips off her gloves, revealing – arms. Nothing out of the ordinary, just short nails, chords of lean muscle, callused brown fingers. She catches Tom staring and laughs softly. “What is it?”

“Why do you wear those gloves?”

“Oh. You thought they were to hide a mutation?” Harry shrugs. “They’re more of a safety thing. They let me touch people without making skin contact.”

Tom takes a moment to parse this. “Poison?”

“Some days, yeah.”

She looks more carefully at Harry’s hands and face, searching for the subtle signs a cursory examination might have missed. Slight webbing between her fingers, overlarge tear ducts, a certain extra luster to her dark skin. Capable of producing distracting scents, as she’d demonstrated during Tom’s first session with Ginny… “ _Ah_. Yes, I see. How much control do you have over it?”

“Enough to be a threat,” Harry says, a bit brusquely. “I’m currently producing a strong paralytic.”

“Do I need to ask why you didn’t tell me?”

Lucius and his crew move slowly closer, pausing next to the wrecks of cars and talking carelessly amongst themselves.

Harry snorts.

“I’ve never met one of you this far south,” Tom says conversationally. “I knew a lovely family up in Quebec, back in the day… used to pay quite handsomely for their services, in fact.”

“ _Did_ you, now.” Harry’s voice has gone acidic.

“Not _that_ kind of service. I mean, I wouldn’t have complained, but – no. Sometimes my own venom isn’t enough to get a job done, and I need to barter for more specialized compounds.”

Harry’s eyes narrow, sweeping over Tom. “Are you trying to tell me you’re not afraid of me?”

Tom, who has been tracking Harry’s bare hands with caution, stays strategically silent.

“That figures,” Harry says, suddenly brightening. Tom wonders how much of her good humor is a front. “Most people hear ‘succubus’ and all they can think about is aphrodisiacs and gold-digging, and the fucking _vampire_ is the only one who recognizes the threat.”

“Normal people are used to fearing for their lives,” Tom says. “I’m not. Do you know how many vampires have died to your kind?”

“There are ways to kill you other than… that particular toxin.”

“None quite so efficient, and certainly none as subtle.”

Harry nods slowly, eyes bright with something that looks uncomfortably like satisfaction. Tom feels thankful for the mask, so she doesn’t have to see the smug curve of her smile.

A succubus. Fancy that. Harry has the singular ability to produce any organic compound within minutes, to be secreted from her pores.

Vampires are immune to almost all poisons, but for one. For lack of a better term, Tom has always referred to it simply as the “vampire-killer”. For all her efforts, she could never figure out how to synthesize it herself. Succubi have no such problems. With just a touch, Harry could sentence Tom to death. Tom wouldn’t even know it at first; the toxin produces no symptoms upon initial exposure, then kills a vampire over the course of two days. She had seen it happen a dozen times – facilitated the executions herself. It’s an ugly way to end.

With a clatter of stone, Parvati rounds the corner. “Lav said you two were going to do something stupid and you need a bit of backup. I’m in.”

“Good.” Tom eyes Lucius and his patrol speculatively. “Aim to capture the blond man. Kill the others.”

“That’s it?” Parvati falters. “I – that isn’t much of a plan.”

“You two will sneak along their flanks, then I’ll rush in and do what damage I can with the element of surprise. On my command, you’ll join the fray.”

“Nothing wrong with simplicity,” Harry remarks, cracking her knuckles. Tom catches the oily gleam of poison on her hands.

“Right,” says Parvati resolutely. “Well then – see you on the other side.”

Under the bloody eye of the setting sun, the rebels creep away through the ruins, closing like a snake’s jaws around the soldiers whose fealty Tom had commanded just a month ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any _Mistborn_ references are 100% intentional.


	3. Chapter 3

Tom devised the classifications system in the wake of the final oil war, when a power vacuum the size of the Great Plains spanned the continent and all transportation systems slowed to a crawl.

It was a strange era. Forced to settle in place, people formed communities, building up cities amidst the ruins of the world. Some tried to reconstruct an approximation of what had been – they learned to farm, finding new methods to raise crops and animals despite the dimmed sun and the threat of the irradiated countryside. Others fostered the arts, passing rusty techniques on to the next generation.

And then there were the universities. Academia, against all odds, had a way of surviving. Tom herself felt inexorably drawn to the books and libraries preserved amongst the ash. She sunk her teeth into them with the same heady relief as she would a human throat, dedicating herself wholly to reconstructing histories and creating new branches of science for the study of the changed world.

She found a school in the north-east, near the border of what had been the U.S. and Canada. The place was covered in sea-rusted copper, still messy with radiation from an old bomb. A group of people had found a stash of books preserved belowground and set up a library, imagining themselves a sanctuary of learning amid the madness of the bleeding world.

Tom had forged them into a beacon, a bright shard of hope through the darkness – at least until she grew bored and made of them a tyrannical scholar-oligarchy. She’d spent almost a full generation cultivating that particular sphere of influence.

Those first few years represented the most good she’d done in her life, she thinks. And foremost among her innovations: the push for a formal inventory of the bizarrely beneficial mutations that sprung up in the wake of the meteor.

The classification system may have been a collaboration, but she still likes to think of it as her own. Three main categories of mutation broken down into smaller groups, until the array of impossibilities that humanity had become felt neat and rational.

_Type one mutants_ were altered humans, people with too many limbs or abnormal biological processes – or, later, with ram’s horns and tiger’s eyes and feathers in the place of hair.

For example, _Ranaevenena viridian_ , colloquially known as the succubus. Diet mostly standard, but often supplemented with abnormal plant compounds; subjects generate dangerous compounds in accordance with mood.

Type two mutants were hybrids. Much rarer, thank the bleeding heavens, but still mind-bendingly _possible_. Creatures like Atticus: warped meshes of nauseatingly different animals. Centaurs and werewolves; rodents with useless wings and mountain lions with a coyote’s temper.

Finally, type three mutants, like Tom herself: _Natusaelum culiseta_ , colloquially known as the vampire. Spontaneous mutations. People that had been human, then became decidedly _not_ in the aftermath of the meteor strike.

Perhaps it was in those early years – while dusty sunlight filtered through a hole in the domed roof, as Tom described her transformation to a rapt audience – when they all knew the world was irretrievably broken. Because for all their best efforts, they found no scientific explanation for the creature Tom had become.

* * *

Tom stands under the brutal milk-gray sky, cleaning blood from under her nails. At her feet twitches Lucius, immobilized by Harry’s paralytic, eyes afire with the same aristocratic rage that once persuaded Tom to bring him under her wing.

He doesn’t recognize her – Voldemort had been a painted wooden mask, a dress, a veil, the echo of a cruel laugh. She’d never shown her true face to the Stadium Court.

The other three scouts lie face-down, letting their lifeblood drain into the soil. It’s a damn waste, but Tom doesn’t allow herself to indulge. She’ll need herself crisp for the next few hours; feeding will make her sluggish.

“Hold still,” Harry mutters. She’s fussing over Parvati, fallen to the ground alongside her enemies. “Give me a moment and I’ll apply a numbing agent… you just need to hold on until we can get you back to the healers…”

Parvati makes no response. She’s hunched in on herself, clawed hands curled against her chest like the legs of a dead spider.

A broken sob comes from Harry, leaning over, her hand pressed insistently against the skin of Parvati’s stomach. A spike is embedded there. Tom listens dispassionately as Parvati’s heartbeat shudders, then goes silent.

“She’s dead,” she tells Harry, poking at Lucius with her boot. One of his eyes lolls shut, limp with whatever poison Harry had pumped into his system.

“Fuck _off_ ,” Harry says. “Can you pretend to be human for like five _seconds_?”

Tom can only assume this is meant as a joke, but when she squints down at Harry she sees tears in her eyes. “Dear, I haven’t been human in a very long time. And even when my heart still beat… well, I don’t think you’d have liked me all too much.”

Harry hisses, low and wounded. “Just – help me carry her.”

“Don’t be silly.” Tom stoops down, pulling Lucius into her arms with a grunt. For all her supernatural strength, he is not a small man. It’s difficult to get a grip on his limp limbs. “We have a mission.”

“I am your _commanding officer_ ,” Harry spits, eyes dizzyingly green in the light of the falling sun. “You can’t just –”

“You’re not used to losing people, are you.” It’s not a question. Tom can practically taste the grief radiating, irrationally, off her.

“She’s my friend. I can’t – how do you get used to a loss like that?”

Tom just smiles. “People die all the time. You just need to learn to make them do it when it’s convenient for you.”

“You’re disgusting.”

Tom sucks on her fangs. In her frustration, a sweet curl of venom leaks from them. She lets Lucius flop to the ground, biting down a curse.

Harry looks up, startled and wary, as Tom forces herself to lay a gentle hand on her clothed shoulder. “Maybe so.”

“I don’t understand you,” Harry says shakily. Tom carefully tracks her hands, but they move only to pull her gloves back on. “How can you be so callous?” A tear slips free of her eye. The scent of it is sharp on the air, salt mingled with something different, fruity.

Damage control time. “When you’ve seen as many people die as I have, you learn to prioritize the living,” Tom says as kindly as she can, molding her face into the sweet mask she used to turn on her schoolteachers in the old world.

There’s a vulnerability in those abyssal eyes, a new rhythm to Harry’s heartbeat. _Ah_. Perhaps a different mask, in that case…

Tom tilts her head, dredging up old memories. Daphne had fallen in love with a version of Tom – beautiful Daphne, who she had left to die young. What color had her eyes been…?

She smiles, close-mouthed, in the way that Daphne had liked. “Harry, we shouldn’t be worried about a cooling corpse. We should be concerned with _you_ , and the rest of the Order. Our prisoner here has the potential to be a huge boon.”

One of Lucius’s fingers twitches impotently.

“I –” Harry wets her lips, anxious, eyes darting. “I – yeah. I suppose so. We can come back for Parvati… do you need help to carry him?”

“I’ll handle it.” Tom withdraws, pulling Lucius’s stiff body back into her hold. “I can go back and get him secure. I recommend you tag along and send someone else back out here to loot these bodies and secure Parvati for cremation.”

“Right,” Harry says, swaying as she stands. “That’s, uh. That’s sensible. Thank you, Tom.”

Harry’s gratitude tastes strangely sweet. “Of course,” Tom says, pasting on an expression of concern. “Are you going to be all right? You’re a little unsteady there –”

Harry shakes her head, patting ash off her trousers.

Indeed, as they shuffle back to the mouth of the tunnels with Lucius in tow, Harry regains her usual composure.

Lavender’s not waiting for them – in her place stands Hermione, both sets of arms crossed. “Harry –?”

“Parvati’s dead,” snaps Harry. “We need at least three people out here to retrieve her. I’m going with Tom to secure this prisoner and regroup.”

“Fuck,” Hermione says simply. “Okay. Fine. I – what do you need from me?”

“Stay here and organize the backup,” says Harry. “I’ll send you Lavender. She was there for most of it.”

Tom shifts Lucius, grimacing.

“Thanks, ‘Mione,” Harry says, patting Hermione on the shoulder as they pass.

Tom slips after Harry into the darkness, meeting the creeping suspicion in Hermione’s eyes with customary disdain.

They find Lavender soon enough, sitting with Zacharias in a narrow alcove. Harry sends them to Hermione and brings Tom deeper and deeper into the caves, until the walls are slick with damp and the weight of the earth feels like a dark promise. Here, there are no lanterns to guide their path, just a narrow candle dripping wax down Harry’s fingers.

“The Order didn’t carve this place, did you?”

“Oh, no,” Harry says. “This system of tunnels has been here for decades before we started using it.”

Tom lets the tips of her fingers glide over the lichen-rich stone encircling them. The wet grime catches on her hands, and she cleans them against Lucius’s fine crimson cloak. “It’s always strange for me to realize there are parts of the world yet unknown to me.”

Harry’s soft laugh echoes in the tight space. “You aren’t what I expected from a vampire.”

“Oh?”

“You like people, don’t you? As more than meals, I mean. You like studying people, learning what drives them.”

“How perceptive,” Tom drawls. “You aren’t what I expected from a rebel leader, either.”

“You’re saying I surprised the great, all-knowing Tom herself?” Harry turns, eyes catching fire in the light of her candle. “I must really be something special.”

There’s a warmth to her words. She looks like an old painting, lovely as the night sky even through the ash and grime.

Tom tastes the chemical sweetness of venom in her mouth again, for a completely new reason. “I suppose you are.”

Harry stops in the corridor, reaching up to light a lantern Tom sees propped against the wall. In its flickering amber light, she recognizes the stone and metal of an ancient cell.

“Put him inside,” Harry says, kicking open the rusting door.

Tom complies, leaning Lucius against a rotting footstool in the corner of the cell. “Where are we?”

“As far as we can tell? The tunnels here pass through the basement of an old-world prison,” says Harry. “Cursed place. We try not to use it, but,” she shrugs, “it can come in handy.”

Eying Lucius’s paralyzed form, Tom slips out and carefully closes the door behind herself. “I think the poison’s wearing off. He seems to be stirring.”

“Perfect,” Harry says, tapping her foot. “I’m just about ready to dose him with something new – we’re only waiting on Luna.”

Before Tom can pry, the muted clatter of movement comes from the direction opposite their origin, and Luna steps into the light. Her smile is eerier than ever in the bowels of the earth. “Hi, Harry,” she says breathily. “Are we doing an interrogation?”

Harry pulls off her gloves again, fingers flexing with spider-light elegance. “You can leave us, now, Tom. Go get some rest.”

Tom hesitates.

Luna looks up at her, mouth ajar in a mad smile, eyes the color of wet stone. “You must be hungry, Tom, aren’t you?”

Harry’s fingers tap out a rhythm on the bars of the cell. From within, Lucius lets out a low groan.

Tom catches the scent of the ocean, gentle and free, a paradox this far from the sun. Her insides ache with their emptiness, shivering and growling at the sight of Harry in the darkness.

Tom _is_ hungry. Desperately so.

She flees into the damp darkness, doing all she can to keep her strides even. This is Harry’s fault somehow, with her vibrant eyes and the danger of her bare skin. How can Tom keep her balance in the face of all that?

Pansy is in their room when Tom returns. She’s chatting with a woman Tom’s never seen, broad and chestnut-haired.

“Dahlia,” Tom greets her flatly. “Who’s your guest?”

Pansy jumps guiltily, halting the swing of her hammock. “Oh – Tom! Hi. Millicent lives here, too. She sleeps just over there. Have you two not met – uh. Tom? Are you… all right?”

“Who’s ‘Dahlia’?” asks Millicent, smiling anxiously.

“Leave,” Tom barks.

The wobbly smile melts off the new woman’s face. “I’m sorry?”

Tom rakes a hand through her hair. She can still smell Harry. _Hell_.

“You should go,” Pansy says. “C’mon, Milly, we’ll talk later, yeah?”

“Oh, _she’s_ the _vampire_ ,” Millicent says with the weight of epiphany. “Right. Yeah. I’ll just –”

She leaves, slipping out through the ragged cloth covering that serves as a door. Pansy sits perfectly still, a sullen crease settling between her eyebrows. “Possessive much?”

“Thirsty,” Tom says, standing over Pansy and placing a thumb to her pulse point.

Pansy makes a low noise, going limp. “Like you’re one to talk,” she rumbles. “I’ve seen the way you look at their leader…”

“Are you jealous?” Tom throws herself onto the hammock beside Pansy. Destabilized, Pansy clings to her, giggling shallowly. “Don’t let it worry you, sweet. We’ll be moving ahead with the plan before you know it.”

Pansy’s blood is a sweet balm. Tom drinks perhaps too deeply, leaving Pansy boneless and shivering.

* * *

Tom wakes to a knock on the dirt wall of their room. She blinks blearily, sitting up against Pansy’s drowsy weight.

The sight of Harry, gaze sharpened and jaw set, is enough to snap her back to wakefulness. Tom chooses not to examine how just the sight of Harry is enough to make her feel like she’s been punched in the gut – because she is not a _child_ , appearances notwithstanding, and she is above silly crushes.

“Walk with me,” Harry says flatly. Tom half-expects her to glance down at her wrist like some old-world businesswoman – but Harry probably doesn’t even know what a watch is.

Tom rouses Pansy just enough to extricate herself from her sleepy grip.

Harry winces, throwing an elbow over her eyes. “And maybe put a shirt on?”

Tom laughs and throws a loose wrap over her chest, pretending she hadn’t heard the way Harry’s pulse jumped at the partial nudity.

“I assume you managed to get something useful out of the prisoner,” Tom says as they step out into the corridor.

“Yes,” Harry says, gesturing for her to follow. Tom guesses they’re heading for the officer’s quarters, or perhaps the mess hall. “We’ll talk about that later, though, with the others. I wanted to talk with you about something else.”

Tom waits, wary.

“Hermione’s a historian. She’s collected what we think is the largest library of post-collapse texts within a hundred miles of here – Tom, do you know how much literature there is on your kind? I was surprised to see how well-documented vampirism is, considering how widespread the misinformation is. There are primary accounts of vampiric transformations, tracking for the movement of individuals throughout post-collapse history, even studies of your biological processes…”

“It’s been a while since I’ve met a historian,” Tom says neutrally. She wonders how much of Hermione’s library is made up of her own writings. The biology section is likely comprised almost entirely of work she'd done at the university.

“Yeah, well.” Harry looks up at her, eyes green as the sea in summertime. They narrow with suspicion. A winter sea, then… “It’s funny. Someone as clever as you, someone so obviously used to command… you should be easy to find in our records.”

Tom laughs. “Harry, dear, I shed names like snakeskin. You’re never going to be able to locate me through mundane research methods.”

“We have Hermione,” says Harry. “The woman’s a _machine_. And she specializes in this stuff – believe me, she can track a vampire without a name.”

“And yet you expect me to believe that she hasn’t found me?” Tom lets her growing glee bleed onto her lips. “You’re right. I might be subtle, but not _that_ subtle. There were only ever a couple dozen of us.” It’s a lie, of course: Tom really is ‘that subtle’. She’s probably _owned_ most of Hermione’s little collection at some time or another – she knows the history of her people better than anyone. Her different aliases look like the work of at least three separate individuals.

“That’s the thing,” Harry says. “We think we have found you, it’s just… well. Hermione has a handful of different theories. Perhaps you can resolve them. Who _are_ you, Tom? Really?” She stops in the hallway. Tom stops, too, looking down upon her. She’s so small; it’s easy to forget the terrible danger lurking under her dark skin.

“Believe it or not, I gave you my real name,” Tom admits softly, wetting her lips.

Harry looks away. “That’s what I was afraid of.”

“I – what?” Tom reaches forward, then stops herself.

Harry’s already walking away, strides long despite her stature. “Come on. I’m briefing the others; you won’t want to be late for that.”

By the time Tom catches up to her, they’ve made their way to the officer’s quarters. Luna, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, and a handful of other familiar faces await them, grimly surveying the map painted on the stone floor

“Tom!” Ginny says, face open and welcoming. “I was hoping we’d see you here.”

“Right,” says Harry, clapping. “Let’s skip the pleasantries. Our little captive gave us a lot of good information, but we’ll have to move quickly if we want to capitalize on any of it. Ron, how’s the project coming along?”

Ron snaps to attention, combing oil-slicked hair up off his forehead. “Explosively, sir. I’ll need at least another month of prototyping – and a _lot_ of fuel – to get it working the way we need it.”

Harry pops her knuckles, grinning in a way that chills even Tom. “Oh, I can _work_ with ‘explosive’. That’s… _yes_. I assume the wheels work, at least?”

“I mean, if you start them spinning downhill? Sure. Harry, what are you –”

“Hush.”

Ron’s mouth closes with a snap. He exchanges a wary glance with Hermione.

Harry steps forward, coming to stand over where Chicago is marked on the map. She turns in a slow circle. “Okay. Listen carefully, now: we need to get this right…”

* * *

“Listen closely now,” Tom murmurs to Pansy, a smile carving its way across half her face. “We need to get this right…”

They march under a burnt gray sky. Dozens of rebels, clothed in ash-colored fabric and armed to the teeth, trail in Harry’s wake. Tom sticks to the rear of the little army, keeping an eye on the others as she explains the plan to Pansy.

Ron sits atop one of his rattling constructions, arms full of wood. He’s attended by Hermione and a silently weeping Padma. Luna walks backwards; though she stands at Harry’s side, she’s watching Tom through enormous, guileless eyes.

Pansy rasps the edge of her knife along a whetstone, grimacing. “Are you sure about this, Tom?”

“Am I –” Tom squints at the interruption. “Magnolia, of _course_ I’m sure. That was the entire point of infiltrating this little band of miscreants.”

“‘ _Magnolia_ ’? Tom, that’s not even close to my name. I – this isn’t funny anymore.”

Tom hums dispassionately. “I didn’t know you owned a knife.”

Pansy clutches the weapon closer to her chest, swallowing. “Milly gave it to me,” she says resolutely.

Tom does all she can to suppress an eyeroll. “I see.”

“Kill me if you like,” Pansy says, voice quivering, dark eyes casting about wildly. “At least then they’ll see you for the monster you are.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” says Tom softly. “I don’t think there will be any need for that. But if you _must_ be dramatic… I’ll cut you a deal. If we manage to pull this off, I’ll let you free and give you enough of my venom to keep you alive for another decade. You and your new plaything can go live out your wildest dreams. Start a farm out west, become bandits… choose a fantasy and it’s yours.”

“You’d just…”

“Let you go? Of course. I can find a new partner easily. Keeping you around isn’t worth the effort if you’re unhappy.”

Pansy nearly stumbles in her fixation on Tom. A decision crystallizes slowly in her eyes. “Okay.”

Tom smiles. “Then we have ourselves a deal.” _Mortals_. So gullible.

The landscape peels away under their feet, giving way to the ruins of the old industrial district. In the distance looms a skeletal forest, branches frozen in stubborn black tendrils against the sky. A ripple of disquiet passes through the ranks as their quarry becomes visible just over a ridge, and at a signal from Harry everyone fans out, settling into silent watchfulness.

Harry catches Tom’s eye, beckoning her to her side.

“There’s my cue, Pansy,” Tom says. “You have the materials?”

Pansy’s eyes widen at the sound of her real name. “Yeah. I’m ready.”

“Good,” Tom says. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

She scoffs. “I hope I never see you again.”

Tom laughs and jogs away to where Harry kneels behind the shell of a delivery van, flanked by Luna and Ginny. She’s inspecting the underside of one of Ron’s contraptions.

“It’s just as Lucius reported,” she says when she sees Tom, eyes snapping with manic joy. “The Dark Lord really is looking to expand southward. This is the perfect chance to strike.” She pats the side of the contraption with a smile. “How long will it take them to get going, Ron?”

“Give ‘em seven minutes,” he answers, looking up from his own careful examination of the device’s wheels. “That’s when they start to get unstable. You want me to start now?”

“Luna, thoughts?”

Luna peeks around the truck. She’s seeing, Tom imagines, a long line of Stadium Court troops, resplendent in crimson-dyed fabrics. They file in their dozens down along the base of the ridge, halberds at their shoulders, moving in crisp unison. Tom had trained them well.

“There are a lot of them,” Luna says, hushed. Tom assumes she’s very intimidated. “Oh – I think I see – there’s a woman in white, and they’re carrying her on a – a palanquin? Is that what they call it when someone’s on a little mobile –”

Harry sucks in a breath. “ _Yes_. We were right: that’s her.”

What is Bellatrix _thinking_?

“Perfect. Ron, send the signal to start up the machines. We’ll aim to hit her when she’s right below us.”

Tom goes to sit beside Luna, watching the tide of scarlet soldiers creep through the shimmering heat on their way to the unclaimed south.

In the middle of the great red snake of enemies sits a figure resplendent in white. The Dark Lord Voldemort, to all appearances. How strange, to watch her from afar.

Seven minutes pass slowly, marked by the creeping approach of the Stadium Court and Harry’s increasing agitation. Ron’s contraptions have begun to whistle and shake, quietly enough that the figures below will never hear. Bellatrix-as-Voldemort is borne ever closer, her veil swept aside by the breeze of her passage, the plain wooden mask over her face turned a muddy pink by dust and ashen sunlight.

There’s hatred in the eyes of the rebels as they look upon her.

At last, Ron straightens, grim. “They’re ready,” he says. His machines are trembling now, leaking boiling water from their seams.

Harry takes a last peek out at the approaching army. “Go.”

A series of hand signals fly between the rebels. Then, creakingly slow, Tom watches as they ease the four contraptions to the edge of the ridge. Bellatrix’s palanquin makes its passage just below.

Ron looks to Harry. After an unspoken exchange, he nods and releases the device at his side.

And so it begins.

Four contraptions clatter down the hill, gaining still more momentum – the sound is great enough, now, that the army looks up – first confusion, then panic –

Harry whirls, eyes alight. “Charge!” she roars.

And then she’s pelting down the hill, leaping between boulders and ruined cars with dexterous precision. The others follow, shouting.

Tom pauses for a moment, watching carefully. Ron and Hermione pelt down just behind Harry. And there’s Pansy, near the frontlines, brandishing her knife above her head. She throws a glance over her shoulder, catching Tom’s eyes just long enough for her to see the hatred written into her face.

That’s fine, though. Tom just needs Pansy to do her damn job.

“Coming?” Luna says, pinning Tom with an apparent lack of suspicion.

“Of course,” Tom murmurs, and they spill together over the ridge, down into the brewing bloodbath.

The prototype steam engines are almost to the bottom of the hill, on a direct collision course with the heart of the Stadium Court’s army. In a moment, they’ll crash into their forces, erupting into fire and steam and chunks of vicious flying metal.

Tom races like an antelope in their wake, breathing in the scent of burning that pervades every inch of the earth’s surface. The sky bubbles with sickly gray light, clouds curling around a nascent storm.

The engines burst into the enemy ranks and plow down red-clad figures in the dozens.

The screams of the Stadium Court mingle with the war cries of the Order, rising in a brutal inharmony.

There are no explosions.

Tom laughs, lets the sound of her glee lose itself in the swirling chaos. The rebels falter in their avalanching charge – without their makeshift explosives, they are hopelessly outnumbered in this fight. Harry, at the fore of the attack, lets out a call of stalwart determination, and they renew their assault.

It is precisely as Tom had planned.

She finds it difficult to celebrate, though, as she watches Harry finally make contact with the enemy forces. She’s fast, and strong, and clever, but she’s built for close-range combat. The long halberds of the enemy present a significant threat.

Hermione falls in alongside Harry, wielding twin broadswords, and for a moment the tides turn in their favor. Harry darts inside the distracted soldiers’ guards, touching bare hands to their exposed faces and dropping them to her poisons.

But it’s not enough. The rebels are dying, and it tastes of bitter rot and bile.

A soldier lunges, and Tom sees a bright flash of red fly from Harry’s arm. Already, the scent of blood from the battle is rising, enough to send Tom into a battle fury if she allowed herself, but the bloodlust is tempered by the cold fear. It gnaws at her bones, climbing up her throat from her lungs.

Harry is going to die. For all her machinations, the idea of it makes Tom sick.

To lose someone so vivacious, so alive, who smells of ocean and long-extinct flowers –

No. Tom cannot allow it.

She wavers for a moment, torn between her plans and the hideous reality of Harry’s peril.

A blade catches Harry’s cheek, and her shout of pain pierces the sounds of combat – with that, Tom can no longer wait. She discards her weeks of plotting and gives herself up to gravity’s pull, tumbling down into the ravine. The copper-thick air hums. Her dead heart aches with something that feels like a rhythm, like the alien sensation of life.

Over the clash of battle, she can hear the faint whistle of the engines. Pansy’s meddling won’t hold for much longer; in bare minutes, the machines will explode, and the rebels will soon go up in a screaming clash of steam and fire. Tom alone will endure the wreckage. She will survive, finding her old mask and holding it aloft. Her final masterstroke, the completion of this little game.

Ah, steam technology. Harry could have used Ron’s mind to remake the world in her own image. They would have a second industrial revolution, a fresh Renaissance. This will be the fourth time that Tom has killed a young inventor… she likes the world the way it is, even if the child within her rejoices at the thought of trains returning to the land.

She will bring Voldemort’s mask back to the old sports stadium for which the Court is named, crowing her victory and fashioning herself a new throne. The people will know her first as savior, then later as tyrant. Then, in time, she will grow bored. Perhaps she’ll return to the southern continent; she’s heard there’s a new mutation propagating on the northeastern coast that allows for limited human flight…

But no. Tom no longer wants that future.

She dodges through lancing blades, between grappling soldiers, hand over her nose to keep the smell of blood at bay. Is she imagining the humid heat on the back of her neck? Is that high note lingering on the air just the dying scream of a rebel?

No. The devices are going to blow. Only one of them needs to go off; the others will follow suite, promising a conflagration the likes of which Tom hasn’t seen in years.

The rebels know it, too. Tom sees the desperation in their eyes as they struggle through the crowds of their enemies; they are willing to give up their lives. If it means unseating the pretender perched, veiled and impassive, on the throne hidden away behind layers upon layers of red-clad troops, there is little they wouldn’t sacrifice.

Arrows and throwing knives arc through the air, but they’re caught on the hard edges of shields Tom had commissioned for the personal guard of the Dark Lord Voldemort.

She wonders what Bella is thinking, beneath the mask. Is she scared?

Surely not. More likely she’s twitching with the urge to join the fray herself. Tom used to be so fond of that insatiable bloodlust of hers…

There’s Harry, finally, the green of her eyes sharp as the flash of fish scales in a murky pond. She bares her teeth, hand steaming with acid and raised in threat.

She is the most beautiful person Tom has ever seen, in all her time on this rotting planet. It doesn’t hurt to admit that anymore.

Tom snarls, rushing forward to knock aside the brute Harry’s sparring with.

“Tom,” Harry gasps, not hesitating to fall into a pair-fighting formation. “Took you bloody long enough. I was half-convinced you would cut and run.”

Tom’s laugh is a sticky thing. “No honor in that.”

“Oh, are we pretending you have honor, now? Good to know.”

They’re out of time. Tom senses it building on the air, can feel a ghost of the pain to come. “Brace yourself,” she says.

“What?”

But Tom’s already spinning to scoop Harry up in her arms.

She’s hot against her chest and shoulders, and lighter than Tom had expected. It’s like holding an enormous housecat: Harry tolerates being handled, but wriggles to make it clear she can leap free at any time. And the smell of her, good _Lord_. It’s subtle enough that a human would have trouble picking it out, but this close, combined with the heat of her body –

And then the burning starts, the acid on Harry’s hands eating through Tom’s clothing like flame through tissue paper.

“What are you playing at?” Harry hisses, fingers tightening on her shoulders in clear threat.

But Tom is already moving, ignoring her questions, gripping her tightly by the waist and narrowing her eyes through the agony in her back. She throws herself over corpses and vaults between the rusting remnants of burnt-out townhouses, headily grateful for the endurance of her mutated body.

She’s so focused on their surroundings and the feel of the woman in her arms that she doesn’t notice the weakness of the wood below her feet.

Her only warning is a sharp creak.

Then they’re crashing through the floor of a moldering townhouse, splinters flashing by in the air around them, engulfed by ancient, mold-damp air. Harry shouts in surprise, clinging to Tom with bruising strength.

They collide with the floor of a concrete basement just a moment later. Tom grunts, stunned by the pain – then stops, hearing an unmistakable rumbling from up above.

“What –” Harry wheezes, pulling herself away. “What the fuck was that?”

In the moment before the blast finally goes off, Tom throws herself over Harry, baring her acid-eaten back to the inevitable explosion.


	4. Chapter 4

“You’re sure you can’t see anything?” Tom asks from where she lays, face-down, on the approximation of a pillow that they’ve amalgamated from scraps around the basement.

“Just more dirt,” Harry says grimly. Tom hears a soft crunch as she hops down from the hole they’d plunged in through. “It’s a wonder this pocket didn’t cave in, too… I think the explosion triggered an avalanche.”

“Voldemort?”

“We can only hope it killed her, too.”

“Can you see any hope of digging ourselves out?”

“Not without bringing the ceiling down on us.”

Tom tries to sit up, then subsides, hissing in pain. “How long did you say those canned beans would last you?”

“Another two weeks, at least,” Harry confirms. “And it’s damp enough in here that I shouldn’t die of dehydration.”

“Oxygen?”

“That’s what I was checking. I can feel a bit of a breeze up above, but I can’t see any hint of daylight.”

“How risky do you think a fire would be?”

Harry is quiet for a long moment. Tom can hear her shuffling closer in the dark. “We’ll wait and see if we can learn more about the air flow down here. I don’t want to risk us asphyxiating just for a bit of light.”

“You don’t want to risk _you_ asphyxiating, you mean.”

Harry snorts. “I keep forgetting you’re not human…”

“Hmm.” Tom blinks, trying to determine if the darkness behind her eyes is more profound than the black stretching out before her. “Count the vampirism an advantage. My body will repair itself far faster than a human’s would.”

She imagines she can see Harry’s eyes: two chips of bright sea glass cutting through the gloom. “And your… other needs?”

“Blood? Well, I assumed –”

“You’re not going to be feeding off me.”

“I don’t see that we really have an alternative,” Tom growls. “Without sustenance, I can survive at best another three days.”

“Tough luck.”

“Don’t be a fool. You need me alive if you want any hope of finding your way out of this pit.”

A rustle in the darkness, and Tom senses the warmth of Harry settling over her prone form. She tenses at the brush of fingers against her clothed spine. “Actually, I have a feeling I’d fare better with you _dead_ than alive.”

Despite herself, Tom shivers at the threat inherent in those creeping fingertips. How long would it take for Harry to begin producing the vampire-killing toxin? Hours? Minutes? “I don’t know if that’s true,” she says neutrally. “My senses are a lot stronger than yours. Without me, I daresay you’ll have a lot more trouble digging your way free.”

“You carried me away from the battlefield for some mysterious purpose,” Harry says tightly. “You clearly have some agenda, but _I have no idea what you want from me_. And if I leave you alone and let you heal, you’ll turn on me in – how long? A day?So, no. I don’t trust you at all.”

 _Ah_. Yes, Tom can actually see where she’s coming from. “I swear I won’t drink from you without explicit, uncoerced permission.”

“Not enough. What were you thinking, taking me away from the battlefield?”

Tom can barely pick out the scent of the sea through the musty odor of the underground. “Those improvised bombs were going to blow, and you were going to die. I didn’t want that.”

“Why would you care if I live or die? You’re an ageless parasitic… oh, hell. Did you _know_ you were going to get trapped? Did you nab me as a – a snack?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tom mutters into the scrappy pillow. “How could I have anticipated any of this? I just didn’t want you to die.”

“Why would you care?”

“I… there are so few beautiful things left in the world, Harry.”

Tom feels Harry’s presence retreat, hears her pulse accelerate. “And the others?” she asks.

“If there really was an avalanche…” Tom shakes her head, though the gesture is lost in the darkness. “I’m sorry, little one.”

Harry doesn’t speak for a long time after that. She makes no noise that Tom can discern, but she recognizes the salty smell of desperate tears.

* * *

Tom rests. The acid burns on her back are slow to heal, but her broken bones mend quickly. Within hours, she’s able to sit up with minimal pain.

“Don’t panic,” she says in response to the sharp increase in Harry’s heartrate. “I told you, I’m not going to eat you.”

“Why should I take your word for it?”

“Doesn’t really matter anymore.” Tom stretches. “You lost your chance to kill me while I was defenseless… we’ll just have to get out of here before it comes down to a conflict between my honor and my life.”

“Oh, how _reassuring_ ,” Harry says bitterly.

Tom hums calmly, trailing her fingers along the concrete of the basement floor and trying not to think about how dirty she is.

There’s a rustle from across their little pocket of space, and when Harry next speaks her voice rings out from ground level. “Tell me about the old world.”

“Oh? What about it?” Tom eases back into her makeshift pillow, already spinning potential story threads through her mind. Her followers at the university had craved similar tales, and over the years she has learned how to tell them well.

“I thought that as long as we're trapped here, we should have something to talk about,” Harry says defensively.

Tom raises a judgmental brow into the darkness. “I agree.”

A little huff of breath from Harry. “Oh.”

Tom waits.

“I want to hear about trains,” Harry says decisively. “Ron says there were devices like his steam engines, but um –”

“Actually functional?”

“Yeah. He says they used to carry people from city to city, that you could go up the entire coast in a day.”

How unexpectedly charming of her. “Trains…” Tom muses, propping herself against the wall and letting her eyes drift closed. “All right.”

* * *

When Tom was a child, she thought that trains were living creatures: beasts of steam and metal, hollering their way across the countryside. The orphanage where she grew up was built near the tracks – far away enough that she couldn’t see the machines, but close enough that the noise of their movement lulled her to sleep each night.

They sounded like mourning doves, calls magnified by some unnatural machinery. She became convinced they had beaks hidden somewhere behind the grates of their jaws, that the plating of the carriages was carapace to cover their feathers. In the summers, she spent hours pacing along the tracks, mapping London from the vantage of the railways.

Because yes, she was born on an island across the sea – surely you picked up on the accent, Harry? London was a beast unto itself, coal-stained rooftops and the rolling Thames framing the lives of a million breathing, dreaming people.

Ruins upon ruins, like the Chicago of the new world. But _shining_ – not tenements built into the shells of old department stores, but skyscrapers standing next to old churches.

That was the London Tom had seen from the tracks, when she slipped away from the matrons and set herself loose on the greater world. It was not, however, the London that raised her. She was raised on London’s ashes and dregs, sleeping with a rusted pocketknife and learning to ruin her enemies. Learning to _make_ enemies.

And perhaps that was why she so loved the trains. They were things of soot and brutality, just as she was, but they had directionality. Purpose. Part of her envied these great metal bird-beasts and their grand destinations.

Looking back, she’s almost surprised that she never slipped onto one of them. But that was the grand paradox of the old world. For all the freedoms afforded to its residents – freedom from radiation sickness, freedom from the uncertainty of the vast plains the new generations call home – people were still bound in shackles of poverty and fear. Had Tom set off on her own, she could easily have starved.

By the time she was ten years old, Tom had realized that trains were just _things_. No mysteries hid beneath their slick metal sides; they weren’t disguising enormous, pulpy hearts between their wheels. Only then, though, did she have the chance to actually ride in one.

She had gained admittance to a boarding school up north – because the nuns, for all they hated her, couldn’t keep her from excelling at the entrance exams – and for the first time in her life, she found herself on the inside of King’s Cross Station. It was an enormous structure, all glass and steel, and the coal smoke inside tasted like freedom.

Childishly, she imagined herself boarding something wild, something that could buck her off if it wanted to. And when the great scarlet train engine growled into movement, roaring away from her city and into the wide-open countryside, Tom could have sworn it _flew_ , unfurling impossible wings and gliding above the land.

There was a magic to the trains back then, a magic that was shattered nine months later. She was eleven years old, and the second train ride of her life took her back to the echoing halls of an orphanage she had never called home.

Tom’s last train ride was years later. A day trip to the seaside. And after that… well. A dead train has a strange mystery all its own. Carriages holding centuries’ worth of refuse, the smell of rust and fire, lone eye gone forever-dark.

* * *

“I would have liked to see one running.” Harry has come close, as Tom tells her story, and they lay side by side in the creeping darkness of their tomb.

Tom hums noncommittally.

“Your voice is nice,” Harry says. “Your accent, I mean… I didn’t know what to think of it. I’ve never heard one like it.”

If she were to reach out, Tom would be able to touch Harry’s face. “Accents change over the years. I’m probably the last person on the planet who speaks like this.”

“You’re like a time capsule.” Harry makes a soft noise. Tom thinks it’s a yawn.

“Are you tired?”

“I haven’t been able to relax enough to fall asleep since… before we caught Lucius, I think.”

“Since before – _Harry_. It’s been over forty-eight hours,” Tom says. “If nothing else, you shouldn’t be leading soldiers to battle on that little rest.”

“We can blame that for how badly I fucked this operation up, then,” Harry says, and the vicious sorrow in those words is enough to make Tom reach out to lay a cautious hand on her shoulder.

She smells like sea breeze and wisteria flowers and cinnamon, and it’s all Tom can do not to weep for the strange beauty of it. “Sleep now,” is all she can think to say.

“Okay,” Harry says, inching closer until Tom can feel the faint warmth of her breath on the air. “Would you keep talking? I think it would help.”

 _She’s so beautiful_ , Tom thinks. And it’s strange, because she can’t even _see_ Harry – but it’s true. She’s the most beautiful person Tom has ever met.

So she keeps talking. She tells Harry stories she’s never told anyone before. Stories of the orphanage, of loneliness and cruelty and perpetual exhaustion. Stories of the wonders of the old world: humming cars, blue skies, sweets that tasted like victory.

When Tom herself finally falls asleep, it’s to the soft sound of Harry’s snores.

* * *

She wakes to a warm weight in her arms and the scent of blood hot in the air, trembling through her very being.

Tom goes very still – for a moment, she’s afraid that Harry’s skin has broken open, leaving her blood to soak out into the world. But no. The scent is all in Tom’s mind – she’s just _thirsty_ , senses hyper-attuned to the living body pressed up against her.

In their sleep, they’ve shifted together. Tom is holding Harry, pressing her nose into the crook between neck and shoulder. The brine scent of her is still there, but Tom can hardly perceive it through the thick odor of human blood.

Harry squirms in her grip, and Tom reflexively holds her tighter, growling.

“Tom.” It’s both command and warning.

Tom loosens her grip without thinking, and Harry pulls away into the shadows. The darkness doesn’t matter anymore, though; Tom can _smell_ her with such intimacy that there is nowhere she can run, no darkness profound enough to hide her…

“What the fuck was that? You said you wouldn’t –”

Tom keens. How long had they slept? There’s a deep ache in the place where a human’s stomach would be – she hasn’t been this thirsty in _decades_ , she just needs –

“Well?”

“I’m going to lay here a while,” Tom murmurs, pressing her nails into her gut and trying to swallow down her venom. “You should eat.” Her victims taste better when they’ve recently fed – _no_ , Tom, don’t – _fuck_. She buries her face in the moldering pillow, choking herself on sticky damp.

“Right,” Harry says warily. After a long moment, Tom hears the clicking clatter of a knife being used to clumsily open a can, then the muffled slurp of Harry choking down the beans. “Huh,” she says. “Not actually half bad. Fancy a bite?”

“No,” Tom says. “Thanks, I guess.”

“No problem,” Harry drawls.

Tom swallows. “I feel like I should probably make this clear right now: you have at most twelve hours before I snap and attack you. I won’t kill you, but –”

“I’ll end up with a chemical dependency on your venom, effectively binding me to you for life,” Harry says.

“Yes. You won’t be able to fend me off, either, not when I’m that deprived of blood.”

“And you won’t let me just kill you now.”

Tom scoffs.

“Then we’re at an impasse,” Harry says. Tom tenses as she comes closer, warming the air with her apple-sweet skin and battle drum heart.

“Give yourself to me and I’ll get us out of here.” Tom purrs, rough and animal, and pushes herself onto her knees, turning her face up to where she can feel the puffing warmth of Harry’s breath. “I promise.”

Harry laughs, so softly that it doesn’t echo against the walls of the basement, and lowers herself to her own knees, pressing her palms against Tom’s shoulder to steady herself. She’s so close that Tom can practically see her painted in scents, ripe and thick on the air.

“Is this a yes?” Tom asks. A drop of venom dribbles from her lips to spatter on the concrete below, and she hasn’t the presence of mind be embarrassed.

“Hush,” Harry says. “ _No biting_.”

Tom opens her mouth to protest, but then she feels Harry’s bare hands move onto her face and goes very, very still. She can feel tension at the points where Harry’s fingers meet her cheeks, and knows that some substance is eating its way through her body.

Despite herself, she’s suddenly terrified.

“If you have poisoned me,” she says with a calm she does not feel, “I will rip you to bloody pieces. I will consume every drop of your lifeblood and never offer you the freedom of my venom. I will claw my way back to the surface and end every one of your kind, and your legacy will be one of ash and bile –”

“Fuck,” Harry says, ripping her hands away. “No, Tom, good _glory_. It’s just nicotine.”

And yes, Tom can feel the drug at work now, spreading sluggishly through the stale rivers of her bloodstream and collecting in pockets of itching satisfaction all over her body. It’s enough, she realizes, to have taken the edge off her thirst. “I see. Good thinking, I suppose.”

“Sure thing.”

“Never touch me without permission _ever again_.”

“Yeah. I got that. Did… did that help?”

“Yes,” Tom admits. “But that strategy won’t buy you longer than a few hours.”

“I _know_ ,” Harry snaps. “I’m just – I’m trying to think.”

Tom waits, dragging her nails along the dusty floor. That breeze she can feel on the side of her face – is she imagining it?

“Can I touch you on your face again?” Harry asks. “I’m not producing any compounds other than, like, sweat.”

“Okay.”

“No biting,” Harry says again.

Hands on her face again, but gentler now, thumbs tracing the line of her jaw. Tom relaxes into the feeling, letting the human heat of Harry spread through her bones. Harry could generate a thousand different intoxicants, but somehow Tom feels that none would produce a simple euphoria like this. The world is nothing but satiny darkness, and they are alone together, and all Tom can smell is flowers and the fresh ocean breeze.

Then Harry kisses her, and all else is immaterial. Harry misses her mouth, at first, pressing a close-mouthed kiss just below her nose, and just that sends a rush of heady desire ripping through Tom.

“Was that – is this okay?”

Tom laughs. “ _Yes_. Now do it properly.”

“You’re cold,” Harry giggles, pulling away.

Tom lunges after her, chasing for her mouth, and she at least finds her target. Harry gasps into the kiss, then _licks Tom’s teeth_ – and now Tom’s the one giggling, because _really_. “You’re _ridiculous_ ,” she tells her.

“Mmm,” Harry says. “No. I’m a distinguished general. I have a reputation to maintain.”

 _Your army’s dead_ , Tom thinks-but-doesn’t-say. Instead she kisses Harry again, hard.

They’re still both on their knees, and though Tom could sit like this for hours without discomfort, she knows humans aren’t always the same way. She sits back down, dragging Harry with her. They disentangle momentarily, Harry’s heart running like a rabbit’s, and Tom pulls her onto her lap – “comfortable?” – “mmhmm” – and lets Harry explore her neck with her tongue.

“Enjoying yourself?” she asks wryly.

Harry hums, tracing a finger down her windpipe. “Oh, do that again.”

“What?”

“ _That_ – I mean, speaking. The vibrations are – they’re good. You have a good voice.”

If Tom had any blood in her system, she’d be blushing. “I – yes. You said that. You know, Harry, you are ridiculously charming.”

Harry nibbles at the thin skin at the base of her throat, and Tom shudders.

“I thought – oh! – I thought you said no biting.”

“That rule only applies to immortal blood-suckers,” says Harry.

“Now that doesn’t quite seem fai –”

But then they’re kissing again, and Tom loses herself in the haze of possessive joy that is holding a beautiful woman in her arms.

“Could I take off your shirt?”

“Oh, please do,” Tom says. “D’you want me to just –?”

Harry’s answer is warm fingers brushing her navel as she pulls Tom’s shirt up and over her head. She’s clearly experienced.

For a moment Tom lets herself be washed away in just that – because it’s _hot_ , everything about Harry is hot, literally and figuratively. She’s touching Tom’s waist, gripping her hips and doing something with her mouth and breath above Tom’s _belly button_ , of all things – and it shouldn’t feel this good, but it _does_ , god it does.

There’s part of Tom’s mind, though, that’s forever-cold, forever-watching. It whispers the stark reminder of what Harry is. She’s a _succubus_. In all likelihood, Tom’s pleasure is a manufactured thing. The desire she feels for Harry is all chemical and no substance.

Harry’s hands drag up her body, tracing the edges of her rib cage and lingering, teasingly, against her nipples. Tom makes a little involuntary noise as Harry’s tongue follows the motion, tracing a line of wet heat from her abs up to her collarbone.

Harry snickers and bumps their noses together in the darkness.

“ _Hello_ ,” Tom whispers nonsensically.

“Hi,” Harry says, and gives her a peck on the lips. It’s a strangely shy gesture, especially given the daring of her previous advances – and Tom finds it hopelessly endearing.

No, Harry hasn’t used an aphrodisiac. Tom’s not sure how she knows this, but she _does_ , knows it as surely as she knows Harry’s eyes are green under the shadows.

These feelings, the longing – for sex, for companionship, for… Tom wants Harry for her own. Those emotions are native to her body, not implanted. _Tom wants Harry_.

Swept up by the decision, she takes Harry’s mouth in her own and pulls her into her lap; Harry squeaks, evidently startled, and throws her arms around Tom’s neck. Tom’s thumbs, slipped under Harry’s shirt, find whipcord muscle and bone.

Her hands tighten around Harry’s waist. “Can I take off your shirt, love?”

“I’ve got it,” Harry says, and wiggles out of her shirt so fluidly that Tom is surprised by how quickly she’s given access to more skin.

“Oh, _hello_ ,” she murmurs again, reaching up to touch Harry’s breasts. Harry guides her hands back down with a little huff of laughter. “You don’t know how badly I want to _eat you_ ,” says Tom hoarsely – and it’s a mistake, but she’s not exactly thinking _clearly_ at the moment –

“Tom,” Harry says warningly. “You want another hit of nicotine? I can –”

“No,” says Tom, lapsing back into that animal purr. “No, I can think of something better to take the edge off.” She rolls them onto the ground, pinning Harry gently by her hips.

Harry’s heartbeat changes subtly, from the rapid pulse of excitement to the darker thump of a cornered animal. Her scent is different, too, gone bitter.

Tom recoils immediately – she knows the scent of poison when she smells it, even if she doesn’t recognize the compound in question.

“No sex,” Harry says from the ground. The utter calm in her voice is at odds with the stuttering anxiety of her heart. “You – I’m sorry, I should have said something before – you can kiss, and cuddle, and touch my waist, but I’m just not into –”

“Sex?” Tom relaxes. “That’s perfectly normal, Harry. You don’t have to be nervous of telling me.”

“Cool,” says Harry, scent mellowing. “I – _cool_. I like to touch, but not to be. You know.”

 _Holding you is better than sex with anyone else in the world_ , Tom thinks giddily. She’s not ready to say it out loud, though. Not yet.

Harry’s hands touch down again on Tom’s chest, and their lips meet. It’s a softer kiss, now. Tom holds her gently by the back of her skull, massaging the tight little curls there.

Harry goes silent for a long time, just holding Tom. “I have a proposition,” she says eventually. “You might, ah. You might want to not – not touch me for the next few minutes.”

Tom, who has been falling gradually into a gentle sleep, frowns into the absolute dark. “Oh. All right, then –”

Harry moves away, leaving her bereft and corpse-cold. “It will take me around three minutes to produce the vampire-killing toxin,” she says, and her voice is suddenly frostbite on the air.

Tom scrambles back, betrayal sharpening her senses. She hates how much this stings – and things had been going so _well_.

“Don’t be difficult,” she says. “I thought – it doesn’t have to be this way – _Harry_.”

“Do you know the mechanisms of the vampire-killer?”

“Slow-working poison… takes up to two days to have any effect. First symptoms are vomiting, joint pain, and pronounced paranoia. Kills within two days of exposure. Irreversible.”

“Notice the pattern?” Harry asks.

“ _Pattern_?”

“What are the symptoms of vampire venom withdrawal?”

“Oh – oh, _fuck_. You don’t mean – no. That’s not how it _works_. Normal vampire venom has no effect on other vampires.”

“It’s an alteration,” Harry says. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t outline the specifics of the chemical.”

“I see.” Tom shifts onto her haunches, wary.

“I’m producing it from every pore on my body,” Harry says, “and I will continue doing so until we reach a compromise. You touch me, and you’re dead.”

Tom hisses softly. “You said it takes you minutes to generate the stuff? You’ve had ninety seconds at best. What’s to stop me from –”

“No,” Harry says. “You won’t attack me. You haven’t heard my proposition.”

“You have thirty seconds to convince me.” Tom stokes the bloodlust at her core, letting the coppery scent of Harry’s blood momentarily overwhelm her.

“Right,” Harry says, pulse spiking, words tumbling from her in an anxious torrent. “Yeah. Okay. So, the vampire-killer, it doesn’t actually kill. That’s the thing. It’s like your venom, it’s extremely addictive – it’s not a poison, not exactly – the _withdrawal_ is what kills the victim.”

“So?”

“So my proposition is – is this. Neither of us has to die. I’ll let you take some of my blood, bind me to you, whatever. In exchange, you let me dose you with the vampire-killer, thus binding you to _me_ , too. Mutual damnation.”

“I –” It’s elegant, Tom has to give her that much. Still: “I don’t want to be bound to a mortal. Particularly if I’m feeding on you, that will give us both only two more decades of life…”

“Yeah, well, the alternative is another two days of life,” Harry says. “Make your goddamn choice.”

Tom hesitates. “I should have let the avalanche have you.”

“Look,” says Harry, the steel in her voice faltering. “I don’t want you dead. I can think of worse people to be bound to.”

There are other choices, ones Harry’s carefully not naming. Bloody conflict in the shadows. Two unbeating hearts, and a slow death on the surface – but Tom’s time has run out. “So…?”

“Just kiss me, Tom,” Harry breathes.

Tom is so thirsty. What draws her closer, though, is the scent of wisteria blooms and the thought of a stormy sea.

It’s too easy to lean forward, to press her lips against Harry’s. Tom’s terror is sharp and terrible, a weight at her core, but the kiss tastes sweet.

“Think of this as a beginning,” Harry says, fingers coming to rest once more against Tom’s cheekbones.

The poison seeps into her, prickling and euphoric, and Tom feels her useless lungs begin to spasm.

Harry snaps out of the kiss. Those heavenly hands slip down Tom’s chest, fluttering like moth’s wings. “Tom? Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Tom says breathlessly. Her fear writhes, morphing into something toothy and delighted. “That’s – this is what my venom feels like?”

This drug only stokes her thirst. Tom’s fangs ache, swollen with unspent venom, longing to sink into mortal flesh.

Harry is a molten light in the cold of the underground, fragrant and thrumming with life. Still, Tom hesitates to consume her.

“Tom. Yes. You – you can do your thing, now.”

“Feed?”

Harry shudders. “I – _yes_.”

A switch thrown, and Tom lunges, picking Harry up bodily and latching onto the meat of her shoulder. Harry gasps as Tom finally, _finally_ , bathes her teeth in blood. The twin sensations – the drug soaking into her skin, the blood flooding her mouth – sing in thrilling harmony through her body.

Harry arches against her, clawing at her back. Tom just holds her more tightly, drinking deeply, relishing every sugared gasp that leaves her mouth.

They are bound.

Tom weeps, and can’t remember why.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I write Harry as gray-ace! This is the first time it's come up explicitly in a story, but it's the case in all my HP work :)


	5. Chapter 5

“There’s definitely a breeze,” Tom says, feeling her way along the roof. “I can’t tell where it’s coming from, though…”

“Can you, like, smell anything?”

“Dirt, I guess.”

“The surface?”

Tom inhales deeply. “Maybe. I’m going to try and move some of these rocks. Go stand in the corner, where the roof is still intact... I don’t want anything to fall on you.”

“Already standing there.”

“Oh – oh, good. Right. Ah, brace yourself.” Tom sets her jaw and reaches out to grip what feels like the edge of a boulder, heaving it out and tossing it to the ground –

A cascade of dirt hits her from above, and she falls, smothered.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she hears Harry says through the pounding of rubble against her skin. “Tom –”

Tom rolls over, clawing her way toward the voice. “I’m fine,” she says, spitting out mud. “Are you safe?”

“I’m well enough,” Harry says stiffly. “It wasn’t a big slide, thank goodness –”

“If it were any larger, we’d be dead,” Tom agrees. “I’m going to do it again.”

“ _Again_? Really?”

“I can smell burning,” Tom says. “That slide opened up a way to the surface.”

“Huh,” Harry says, like she’s trying not to let herself hope. “I – okay, then.”

Tom reaches up into the hole through which they had first plummeted and finds empty space. “Can you hoist me up?”

Harry inches close, putting a hand on Tom’s back. “Ready?”

“Yes.”

A rustle as Harry kneels. “Step onto my hand.” She propels Tom up through the hole in the ceiling – Tom winces, expecting to hit her head, but emerges into open space.

And up above –

“Harry – I think I see light!” A bright pinprick of white up above, not enough to see by, but blindingly intense after days of nothing but black.

“Great,” Harry wheezes. “Now, I’m going to drop you if I have to hold you any longer, so if you wouldn’t mind…”

“Of course, dear.” Tom stretches her arms out to find loose dirt on one side and the remains of a concrete wall on the other. Gingerly, she steps in that direction and lands on what had been the floor of someone’s townhouse.

“Everything all right up there?”

“Perfectly,” says Tom. “I think you should go first; you’re smaller, less likely to cause another slide, and I’ll be able to survive almost anything the earth could throw at me…”

A brief rustling noise and a muted grunt is all the warning Tom has before she finds Harry standing just next to her, gripping her shoulder to stabilize herself on the outcropping.

“How’d you manage to get up here without help?”

“I’m nimble.” Harry squeezes her shoulder, then lets go, cracking her neck.

“Disgusting habit,” Tom comments, wrinkling her nose.

Harry ignores her. “Huh. I think you’re right… I can see light up above.”

“I _told_ you,” Tom says smugly.

“Yes, and _I_ _believed you_. Right. I’m going to see if I can clamber my way up. You… just catch me if I fall, okay?”

“Always,” Tom says, dropping her voice. “We’re partners now, Harry. I will always be here to catch you.”

A beat of silence, then: “Are you messing with me?”

Tom smirks invisibly.

“Oh my – you _are_! Here I’ve been thinking you’re this humorless, deadpan –”

Tom gasps in exaggerated offence. “I will have you know that I am _hilarious_ –”

“Oh, says who?”

“Says you!”

“I most certainly do not! You are a humorless leech in the shape of a very attractive woman –”

“Hey!” Tom says, then, “I – thanks, I suppose?”

Harry snickers, leaning against her, and they sway for a moment in the darkness together.

“Right,” Harry says, sobering. “I’m – I’m going to go, now.”

“If you die, I’ll be very cross.” It’s a deliberate understatement.

“Yes,” Harry says. “And then you’ll be very dead. I promise I’ll try to avoid that.”

“Do you need –”

“No, I think I’ve got a handhold. Just shut up and let me concentrate.”

Tom bites her tongue and obeys. She digs her fingers into the dirt above her head and tries not to wince at every clink of falling stone as Harry hauls herself upward. Harry’s heart rate is surprisingly slow, especially as she climbs higher and gains confidence, and Tom finds herself lulled into a matching calm.

Every so often, Harry will slip or lose her grip, though. Tom will catch a little gasp of surprise, the pounding of an elevated pulse, and feel a fear greater than she has ever known.

Tied to a mortal, and made mortal in her own right. It’s a bitter, bitter thing. And yet, Tom has rarely felt so alive as now, when death could claim them at any moment.

After an eternity, she hears a cry of victory from high overhead. The lone star of light becomes eclipsed by a formless piece of darkness, a rush of dirt skitters down, and the sound of Harry’s heartbeat grows muffled – she’s out.

The pinprick skylight flickers back into being, then out again. From above, Harry calls, “you’re good to go, Tom! Take care, okay? I think I dislodged a lot of the looser soil… try to find boulders that you can get a grip on, but be careful that they’re not going to slip out.”

Tom rolls her eyes. “Don’t lecture, little one.”

Still, she’s more careful than she normally would be as she claws her way out of the earth. And when she finally emerges, caked in mud and fingernails torn, Harry’s embrace makes the ashy freshness of the surface feel sweeter still against her skin.

* * *

The landslide that killed the two armies cuts a long, vicious wound through the land. Tom remembers distantly that there had been the shriveled remains of a forest down the hill from their initial charge; now, even the skeletons of those trees are gone, washed away in a tidal fury of earth.

Tom wants to leave as soon as possible. She has affairs to set in order, a dozen pet projects to check in on before their two decades are up. To delay even hours seems intolerable.

“I’m not used to being _mortal_ ,” she tells Harry, kicking aside clods of dirt.

Harry frowns, looking beyond her to the crimson of the setting sun. “You say that so accusingly.”

“It _is_ your fault,” Tom growls. She can feel the venom derivative poisoning her system even now: an itching at her lymph nodes, a craving at the back of her throat.

“What,” Harry says mildly, “you wanted me to just let you kill me?”

“I – yes, actually.”

Harry gives her a _look_ , eyes shockingly green and utterly unimpressed.

It’s – a lot. After their long stay in the darkness, Tom is unaccustomed to handling the visual component of her attraction to Harry. Something about those eyes against her dark skin, the scar arcing through her eyebrow to her hairline, that certain blend of fragility and determination to the bones in her face...

In all her years of life, Tom has never held such an intense infatuation. She’s inclined to blame the drugs, but a small, scared part of her knows it’s more than that. She half-thinks that given the option between another two centuries alone and another two decades with Harry, she may have willingly given herself up to this strange partnership.

So Tom kisses the one to whom she is so deeply bound. She breathes in the scent of flowers and ocean and lets herself pretend that she is home.

They sleep in the dirt that night. It’s good camouflage, Tom rationalizes – the two of them are so encrusted with earth that to any watching eyes, they will be indistinguishable from the soil around them.

Harry is reluctant to rest; she keeps finding new places to dig holes, looking for any sign of her troops. None of Tom’s increasingly irritated remarks seem to have any effect.

In the end, Harry doesn’t subside until Tom lifts her bodily in the air, carrying her away to the trench she’s plowed for them to sleep. She buries her nose in her wiry hair, whispers, “there’s nothing to be done,” holds her in an embrace colder than death itself.

Harry lays like a wooden doll in her arms, tears rippling at intervals through her narrow frame.

“We’ll find you a new purpose soon,” Tom tells her as gently as she can.

“I don’t want a _new purpose_ ,” says Harry, but she just sounds tired. “They were my friends, Tom. I miss them.”

Tom can find no response to this.

“Just – distract me. You were a professor once, right?”

Tom goes stiff. “How did you know that?”

“We researched you, remember? Don’t underestimate Hermione’s library abilities… _fuck_ , Hermione –” Harry rolls over, hiding her face in Tom’s chest.

Tom pats her on the back, feeling awkward and inhuman. There’s a deep unease sparking to life within her. She hadn’t known Hermione all that well, but if she had uncovered Tom’s past at the university… there’s no telling what else Harry knows.

Rain begins to fall through the night, acidic and biting. Tom tells Harry stories – about old students, about the ocean, about a boy with the nut-tasting blood of a horse. Somewhere between the vibrations of her voice and the patter of the rain, they both surrender to a restless sleep.

* * *

Tom dreams.

She sees the vast horror of a sky painted in venom-bright lilac, clouds hanging like shattered teeth from the heavens. The sea screams, lapping at her ankles, ripping her feet out from under her. Water vapor streams into the air, evaporated away by the heat of a meteor frozen a second from impact.

It’s too bright for her to look at, but she _sees_ it nevertheless. Pockmarked, vibrant, wriggling with voidish imprints. She falls to her knees in the surf and it _undoes_ her, ripping the humanity from all but her skin and skeleton. Mingled pain and ecstasy –

The earth shivers beneath her. Waves break the perfect calm of the North Sea, sloshing madly in the quake. Tom’s standing, now, swaying drunkenly, face wet with seafoam –

“ _Tom_.”

Black breaks through the purple vision, eroding her surroundings until she is all that remains. Tom drifts, terrified – _is this what death will feel like_ –

Soft, full lips on her cheeks. The brush of eyelashes against her brow. “Come on, Tom, wake up.”

“I’m awake,” Tom rasps, opening her eyes to a dizzying gray sky. Already, she misses the perpetual dusk of the Order’s caverns.

“Good.” Harry’s faraway eyes meet hers briefly. “I, uh. I didn’t know vampires slept. You – it’s hard to be sure that nothing’s… wrong when you’re like that. You were, ah, you were kind of twitching.”

“Just a dream,” Tom says, pushing the claustrophobic specter of death from her mind and gathering cold around herself like a cloak. “Apologies for… disturbing you.”

“Right.” Harry wraps her arms around her knees. In that moment, she looks so tiny that it’s hard to remember how sharp she is underneath it all. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to leave today.”

“Yes. We have _work_ to do, Harry. There’s no time to waste on the past.”

Harry blinks rapidly, fog sloughing off her expression. “You said that yesterday, too,” she says, looking up into Tom’s face. “What ‘work’ are you talking about?”

“I buried a cache of gold out east in case of an emergency,” Tom says, rising and trying in vain to shake the mud off her coat. “We’re going to go collect it, then use every resource at our disposal to get ourselves across the Atlantic. I’m not dy – I refuse to leave this world without answers.”

“Answers? Over the _Atlantic_? What?”

“Oh come _on_ , Harry. You’ve read those books in Hermione’s library. You know what I’m talking about.”

“You want to go back to Britain? Where the meteor first struck?”

Tom gives up on her coat and starts shaking mud off her boots, glancing around to determine the orientation of the sun.

“Tom? What even… what _is_ a vampire?”

“Now you’re asking the right questions.” Tom climbs out of their trench, hoisting Harry’s traveling bag over her shoulder.

“Do I get any input on this little quest of yours?” Harry asks sourly, scrambling after her.

“Oh? Do you have a better idea for what to do with the rest of our lives?”

“You’re such an asshole,” Harry mutters.

“I know,” Tom says smugly.

“Of all the people to end up in an unholy partnership, why did it have to be _you_?” Harry continues.

Tom smiles. “At least I’m hot.”

“I – I never said you were ‘hot’! I said _attractive_!”

“Hmm.”

“How can an immortal be this childish?”

“You like it.”

Harry bumps into her, knocking her off-balance.

“Hey!”

Harry snickers.

“And you have the nerve to call _me_ childish? That’s just unfair.”

“You’ll have to get used to my hypocrisy if this partnership is to work,” Harry says in what Tom thinks is meant to be an imitation of her own accent.

On impulse, she reaches down to take Harry’s gloved hand, swinging it between them.

“What?” Harry giggles, wiggling her fingers in Tom’s grip.

“It’s what people do when they like each other,” says Tom loftily. “Hold hands.”

“I know,” Harry scoffs. “But – you do? Like me?”

“I thought I made that very clear.”

“Huh,” Harry says, looking pleased.

They walk without speaking for a while. Tom lets her mind wander freely between plots and fantasies, snatches of half-forgotten songs.

Gradually, she becomes aware of Harry’s expression warping from soft to brooding.

“Is everything all right?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Harry says, too quickly. “I mean – I don’t know. That gold… how did you get it?”

Tom frowns. “Stole most of it. I went through a bit of a gold… _phase_ when I first arrived on the continent. Why?”

“You made it sound like a _lot_ of gold.”

“Yes. It is.”

Harry’s face shifts again, falling into frustration. “I – look, I can’t – we need to talk.”

Tom raises an expectant brow, letting go of her hand.

Harry backs up a step, curling her hands into fists and scowling. She looks like she’s bracing herself for some great impact.

A pit opens at Tom’s core, in the place where a human’s stomach would be.

“That landslide didn’t kill Voldemort,” says Harry. “Did it?”

Tom frowns, tilting her head to the side in an expression of measured confusion. “I suppose there’s a chance she escaped, yes. But you saw the damage the slide did. Most likely –”

“Shut up.”

Pointedly, Tom closes her mouth.

“Hermione had you all figured out, you know.”

“Pardon? Harry, dear, I know you’ve been through a lot. Grief can do strange things to the mind –”

“We talked to Pansy. She told us… a lot.”

Tom feels – empty. Angry?

“And Hermione was able to construct a profile for you based on that, and from there she… she mapped out a whole web of your history. The funny thing is, I – I didn’t even believe her when she first showed it to me. I mean, one person couldn’t possibly – but it was true, all of it. Wasn’t it?”

“You’re going to have to be a lot more specific,” Tom says carefully, struggling to speak around her elongating fangs. “What exactly was this theory of Hermione’s?”

“Voldemort,” Harry says, eyes flashing with accusation. “Marvolo. Walpurgis. Riddle… do I have to go on listing aliases? Hermione was right, wasn’t she? There has only ever been one great vampire conqueror in the Americas. A single puppet master, stringing the entire continent along in some grand, sick game…”

_Damn_. Tom knew Harry would figure things out eventually, but she’d hoped to have more time. She could have broken it to her over the course of months, until the eventual revelation felt gradual. Natural. “I hope you’re not thinking of doing something rash,” she drawls, eying Harry’s covered hands.

“You must hate this,” says Harry, flinty. “Your glorious plans for yourself, doing – whatever the fuck you do. All shattered by some kid leading her friends to war from a dead idiot’s basement.”

“I’m choosing to believe I was, ah… blown off course, shall we say, by a frighteningly competent rebel and her dashing good looks.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“ _Isn’t_ it, though?” Tom snaps – and yes, she’s angry. It’s been a while since she’s been properly angry. It’s a viciously familiar emotion. She feels like a teenager again, out of control, too ambitious for her own good, ready to burn herself to cinders for the barest scrap of power. “Look at me, Harry. I’ve spent seventeen decades just – just _filling time_ , destroying people so I didn’t have to stop _moving_. And now I have no time left, and I realize how much I’ve left undone –”

“Oh, boo- _hoo_. So, what, you can’t spend the rest of eternity screwing people over? Am I supposed to pity you? What do you _want_ from me?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” says Tom. She feels, as she says it, that it’s a lie, but she can’t fathom _why_.

“If I had any honor left, I’d kill myself and leave you to die,” Harry growls.

Tom glares. “What’s stopping you?”

A muscle jumps in Harry’s jaw.

“Be honest,” Tom breathes, stepping closer. “You don’t care that I’ve built empires on the backs of innocents. You don’t care that I crushed those same empires. You’re as scared of death as I am – you don’t want to go down in flames. I’m a monster, and _you still want me_.”

Harry’s eyelids flicker. She doesn’t move as Tom’s hands land on her hips.

“You’ve known for days now. And you haven’t done a thing.”

Harry scowls. “I didn’t want to believe –”

“Don’t lie to me. You knew.”

“Maybe I did, deep down. But that doesn’t mean it’s right to just… let you live. After everything you’ve done…”

Tom lets go of her and plops onto the ground, heedless of the dust. “Is this going to be Parvati all over again? People die, Harry. Morality was a construct of the old world; clinging to it is just going to make _you_ one of the dead ones.”

“Morality is what the Order fights – _fought_ for. I’m not going to throw that away.” Harry stands over Tom, gray flecks of ash falling on her shoulders.

“And now the Order is dead.”

“But _I’m_ not. I owe it to them –”

“To what? Kill me? You’ll be dooming yourself in the process. Do you think Ginny would want that from you? What about Ron and Hermione?”

A decision takes shape behind Harry’s eyes. Tom doesn’t like the look of it. “You’re right,” she says.

“I… I am?”

“Yeah,” says Harry slowly. “I don’t have to kill you to keep you from hurting anyone else.”

Tom raises a brow. “What’re you going to do? Put me back in our pit?”

“No,” Harry holds out a hand to help Tom up, eyes brighter than they’ve been since the landslide. “I’m going to teach you to be a better person. You could make the world a better place, Tom – we just need to give you a reason to.”

“Good lord,” Tom mutters. “You can’t redeem _me_.”

“Maybe I can’t. But I know you have the capacity for good.”

Tom scoffs. “Do I?”

“Well,” Harry says, smiling softly. “You saved me, didn’t you?”

“I suppose that was the closest to altruism I’ve gotten in a long time.” Tom wets her lips. “Right. And if I play along, you’ll come with across the ocean?”

Harry nods, shaking her hand in front of Tom’s face.

Tom takes it, smiling ruefully – and as they wander eastward, ever closer to the sea, neither of them lets go. An irredeemable leech and the one she loves. Twenty years, a centuries-old puzzle, and a bond forged in blood and poison.

Perhaps she’s been wrong, all these years – the meteor strike signed the deaths of so many things, but it hadn’t been the end of the world. There’s still room for hope among the ashes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before you ask: yes, there are more stories to be told in this universe. No, I don't anticipate writing them down anytime soon. Still, I hope you enjoyed this little slice of Tom's apocalypse adventures! This was a ton of fun to work on.
> 
> Because this was such an experimental piece for me, I'm very curious to hear what people think of it. Please consider commenting <3


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